Monday 17 April 2017

Glatton

St Nicholas was the first church in a long time that  I was really angered by finding it not just locked but padlocked with no keyholders listed. This was not so much because I desperately wanted to see something inside {it actually looks quite dull inside by what I've seen on Flickr] but more that the church is in the middle of the village by a busyish road and there is no obvious reason it should be padlocked shut.

Having said that the location is attractive and the exterior is cracking but that didn't stop me heading off to Conington with a bad taste in my mouth, I think it might have been bitterness.

ST NICHOLAS. A proud, ashlar-faced Perp W tower. The doorway has traceried spandrels, and the quatrefoil base-frieze runs right round it. Above it a four-light transomed window, then a blank crenellation frieze, to the W with quatrefoils, to the W also a beautifully rich transomed four-light window over, and above that, to the same design, the bell-openings. Top frieze, battlements, pinnacles with animal supporters on them. The body of the church is embattled. The aisles embrace the tower. The S aisle is of c.1290-1300 externally - see the intersecting tracery in the W and E and the Y-tracery in the S windows. The chancel has one low-side window with Y-tracery too, but the rest is Perp, over-restored in 1857. The N transept is again of the date of the S aisle - see the E windows with a quatrefoil placed diagonally above two lights. On the N vestry to the E another quatrefoil frieze. As for the interior, the chancel arch goes with the chancel, but the three brackets above it for the rood are Perp. And the arcades are earlier than anything outside, though much changed. They were built about 1200, but were then considerably lower. They are of three bays with round piers and moulded octagonal capitals - except for one which is still many-scalloped. That is a Norman motif, but so are the round arches. They already have double chamfers. In the transept is a big bracket with nailhead - i.e., like the window, late C13. The vestry is vaulted in two bays of quadripartite ribbing. The clerestory is of course Perp; large three-light windows. The windows are unusually large for Huntingdonshire clerestories. - SCREEN. High, Perp, with one-light divisions. Ogee arches and panel tracery - all almost entirely C19. - BENCHES. A specially good set of poppyheads on the ends, including e.g. a bearded man and a woman with a square headdress. - PAINTING. On the nave E wall, N St Mary Magdalene, standing, against a background with ornamental crowns, S Christ rising from the tomb, a kneeling priest round the corner on the nave S wall. Both are of c.1500. - PLATE. Cup of 1695-6. - MONUMENT. Large, unidentified hanging monument with two arched recesses with shell tops between three columns. On the columns weird short pilasters of bulgy outline. The most likely date is c.1600.

Locked

GLATTON. One of the fairest villages in the county (the village in which Beverley Nichols wrote his first garden book) it has a noble church and lovely houses. Many of them are 17th century, and one of the cottages is a gem, its thatched roof overhanging white walls and grand timbers.

Who could pass this church without stopping to admire its parapets and windows, and who could come to it without pausing to look up at the lovely corbel table of 25 little faces outside the south wall? The Norman arches of the nave remain, and both doorways of the  roodloft. The transepts are 13th century, the spacious south aisle is 14th, and the clerestory, the small chancel, and the massive tower (which seems to take up more than its fair share of the nave) are all 15th. The tower has great dignity, a beautiful west doorway, a neat band of tracery, and a fine parapet with heraldic beasts at the corners. In the sill of one of its top windows are some stones thought to be Saxon.

Opening out of the chancel is a beautiful chapel once used as a vestry, a handsome little room with rough walls and stone vaulting, a fireplace built up, and a 16th century studded door on very fine hinges. On the chancel wall are two stone brackets helping to support the roof, one with a grotesque head seeming to be pulling down one side of its face like an impish schoolboy.

There is an altar table with Jacobean carving, a 17th century pulpit and chest, and a modern font on a 15th century base. The chancel screen has tracery and foliage from the hands of a craftsman born before America was on the map; and there are 16 benches he might perhaps have sat on, some enriched with carvings of heads, and one with two birds bowing to each other. But what this place perhaps treasures most is the group of paintings on both sides of the chancel arch. They have been here 500 years and are still fairly clear, showing Mary Magdalene in a black tunic and white cloak, Christ rising from the tomb, and a kneeling priest.

In our own time there has been dug up in the foundations a very old stone which is now in the west wall indoors; it has a crude carving of a couple looking as old as Adam and Eve. There is a chalice of 1675, and the registers date from 1578.

No comments:

Post a Comment