The church of St Swithun at Nately Scures, a small village to the E of Basingstoke, is a single-cell church comprising an aisleless nave with an apsidal termination. The main feature is the N doorway. One of the capitals, depicting a mermaid, was removed and reset in the SW corner of the nave in 1968. Two original 12thc. windows survive in the apse and one in the W wall, but their internal plaster decoration – probably of 12thc. date – was lost when the church was restored by Salvin in 1864-66. A fragment of an arcaded corbel table appears to have been destroyed at the same time. The neo-Norman bellcote and arcaded font date from 1864-66, as do the three Norman-style windows on the S side of the church.

No church was mentioned in 1086, when Nately was held by Hugh de Port. By the early 12thc., if not earlier, the manor was leased from the de Ports by the de Scures family. It was probably the de Scures who initiated the construction of the church c.1175 (see Comments). Apart from the insertion of a three-light S window, a timber bellcote, a new roof and a W gallery, the building remained largely unchanged until the 19thc.

Salvin undertook a restoration of the church in 1864-66, replacing the existing bellcote and roof, and renewing several windows. The appearance of the church prior to this intervention was reported in detail in Gentleman’s Magazine (1836), accompanied by sketches made in 1835. The N and E apse windows were evidently in their original condition, with shallow zigzag or sawtooth decoration (worked in a hard stucco or cement which ‘might be mistaken for sculpture’) around their internal heads. The author, identified as E. I. C., compared this to decoration found in Compton, Surrey. Above the exterior of the S apse window, which had been subdivided, was a fragment of a corbel table which ‘shows two semicircular arches’. It is likely that most of the corbel table had been removed when the church was reroofed in 1786 (VCH 1911). The inner arch of the W window was decorated with ‘an ornament resembling the diagonal flowers of a later period’: presumably what we now call dogtooth.

The description of 1836 reveals that the bases of the N doorway were in the form of inverted cushion capitals. The balls in the double-cone motif of the second order – which have now lost much surface detail – were described as ‘in some places a torus, in others a mask’, suggesting that their likeness to beast heads was more obvious at that time.

The capitals of the doorway were described in a manner which, if correct, suggests that the mermaid capital (rather than the present scallop capital) was located on the W jamb and an atlas capital (rather than the present mermaid capital replacement) occupied the E jamb. The description was as follows:

‘The capital of the eastern column is a grotesque human figure, of which the legs are not seen, sustaining itself on the hands, as if crouching beneath the weight of the impost; the western column shows a well carved mermaid, with the usual long hair and expanded fish’s tail of this fabled maiden of the ocean.’

The font was described as ‘a circular basin formed of chalk, and constructed for immersion; the extreme edge worked into a torus was all its ornament; it has, however, not been suffered to retain its situation, having been at some period broken to pieces; one of the fragments has been used to mend the step at the chancel; the remainder lie in a heap near the church-yard gate’. The ‘mere basin’ used in 1836 was replaced by a new font in a neo-Norman style in the course of Salvin’s restorations. The arcading decorating this new font clearly did not copy its medieval predecessor.

The E capital of the N doorway was removed in 1968 and a new capital – not a copy, but a free interpretation of the original – installed in memory of Georgina Berry Black (St Swithun’s church trail).

The VCH (1910) dated St Swithun’s to the third quarter of the 12thc. and the doorway to the late 12thc. This was broadly followed by Pevsner & Lloyd (1967), who dated the doorway c.1200, while Bullen et al (2010) opted for the much earlier date of c.1130-60.

Mermaids – often grasping a plait of hair, a serpent, or their own tail(s) – occur in Romanesque sculpture from the late 11thc., through the 12thc., and are not particularly diagnostic of date. Beast-head label stops also span the entire period.

The trefoil arch is more telling. While this feature became increasingly common after 1200, trefoil-headed doorways were not unknown in 12thc. England. The doorway of Bibury in Gloucestershire has a monolithic trilobed tympanum, but at Clymping in Sussex the trefoil arch of the transept doorway of c.1180 is built of voussoirs, like Nately Scures. The Clymping doorway also features point-to-point chevron – like Nately Scures – while the vertical chevron ornament of the jambs relates it to Winchfield, which is located 4 miles E of Nately Scures and has been dated c.1175.

In England, few trefoil-headed 12thc. doorways had cusp rolls. Those of the Monks’ Doorway at Ely Cathedral cannot be trusted. They seem to have been introduced in the course of restoration, perhaps inspired by the cusp rolls of the trefoil-headed arcading in the SW transept, dating from c.1174-1189. A more convincing late 12thc. example is the S doorway of East Dereham in Norfolk. In the vicinity of Nately Scures, soffit rolls (rather than cusp rolls) occur at Winchfield. Despite Nately Scures and Winchfield both having echoes of Clymping (with Winchfield also being closely related to work at Steyning, Sussex, of c.1160-80), their sculpture cannot be attributed to the same workshop. Nevertheless, the occurrence of a trefoil-headed doorway with cusp rolls suggests a date of c.1175-85 for the N doorway of Nately Scures. Furthermore, evidence that dogtooth once adorned the W window (Gentleman’s Magazine 1836) implies that the doorway was a primary feature of a nave (or, at least, its W end) built c.1175-85.