We use cookies to improve your experience, some are essential for the operation of this site.

St Mary, Willingham, Cambridgeshire

Location
(52°18′55″N, 0°3′35″E)
Willingham
TL 405 706
pre-1974 traditional (England and Wales) Cambridgeshire
now Cambridgeshire
medieval not confirmed
now Ely
medieval St Matthew
now All Saints and St Mary
  • Ron Baxter

Please use this link to cite this page - https://www.crsbi.ac.uk/view-item?i=9089.

Find out how to cite the CRSBI website here.

Feature Sets
Description

A big church with a six-bay aisled nave with clerestory and S porch, aisleless chancel with N sacristy chapel and W tower with spire. The earliest fabric is dated by a blocked 13thc. lancet in the N wall, but the nave arcades, the W tower with its octagonal spire on broaches supported by flying buttresses linked to the pinnacles, and the chancel with its sacristy all date from a campaign begun in the 1330s. The sacristy is a unique feature of unknown purpose. It is essentially a separate building with three slender arches inside to carry a stone roof. The nave clerestory is Perpendicular. The exterior is of stone rubble, the ashlar is Barnack. There was a major restoration in the 1890s, and it was in the course of this that 12thc. carved stones were discovered in the chancel S wall. These are now built into the N and S walls of the S porch. The tower was restored in 1990, and in 1999 a new church hall, the Octagon, was added to the N side of the nave.

History

Features

Interior Features

Interior Decoration

Miscellaneous
Comments/Opinions

Pevsner describes the fragments as pieces of an ornate doorway, and the dimensions of capitals and the fact that nook shafts were clearly involved supports this view for many of the pieces. The cushion capitals numbered (xii) and (xv) were not part of this ensemble.

Bibliography
A. G. Hill, Architectural and Historical Notices of the Churches of Cambridgeshire. London 1880, 73-87.
N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. Cambridgeshire, Harmondsworth 1954 (2nd ed. 1970), 486-88.
http://www.willinghamchurch.org/