St John's has an aisled nave with three-bay
arcades and a S doorway under a porch. The chancel is square ended and the W tower has diagonal buttresses. The S arcade and S doorway date from the 12thc., both with round arches and the arcade with cylindrical piers. The N arcade also has round arches, but the piers have a quatrefoil plan and the capitals have crockets. The style is early 13thc., therefore, but Pevsner suggests that it belongs to the rebuilding of the aisle in 1854 by F. W. Fiddian and Ewen Christian. This is incorrect; Fiddian's plan suggests that the arcade was not replaced, and it also appears on J. Buckler's drawing of 1844 (William Salt Library SV VII 69). The S porch is dated 1866, and must replace the porch shown on Fiddian's plan. The chancel windows have Y-tracery or (at the E) reticulated tracery, pointing to a date in the first half of the 14thc. The external cresting of the chancel roof looks 18thc. According to an inscription on its W face, the tower was begun by T. Rolleston in 1515. It has Perpendicular bell-openings and W window and doorway, and a battlemented parapet with eight tall pinnacles. Construction is of reddish ashlar. A plain 12thc. window head is reused as facing stone above the S porch. Two 12thc. lancets are shown above the porch in a Buckler drawing of 1839 (William Salt Library SV VII 66), but they are no longer there, and this window head probably belonged to one of them. Romanesque features recorded here are the S arcade and the S doorway.
