Tuesday 25 April 2017

Oldhurst

I loved St Peter, locked no keyholder, which seemed to me more of a chapel of ease than a church and was sad to find it locked even though I suspect the interior would be a disappointment.

ST PETER. Nave and chancel in one. Space for two bells in the gable.* The building is E.E., see the S doorway with a pointed-trefoiled head, the lancets and pairs of lancets as windows, and the Y-tracery of the E and W windows. Perp tiebeam roof with crown-posts. - FONT. Octagonal. Probably of c.1300. Blank windows with intersecting tracery on all eight sides. - PILLAR PISCINA (SE corner). Norman, with decorated stem. - PLATE. Cup and Paten, late C16.

* Mr McHardy points out that on the nave E gable is a very odd rood, the figures of the Virgin and St John being replaced by foliage of roughly human shapes.

St Peter (4)

OLD HURST. It has a farm of Shakespeare’s day, church walls enshrining 600 years of village life, and an Abbot’s Chair which would seem to many its most historic possession.

The farm has a magnificent barn, timbered and thatched, and one of the best for miles around. The church has a tiny nave and chancel under one roof, a font older than the Canterbury Tales, a chalice by an Elizabethan craftsman, and one of a group of stone altars we have found hereabouts which survived the Reformation.

The Abbot’s Chair is a mile on the road to St Ives; the children will tell you that the man with seven wives rested in it. It is a great stone something like an armchair which may have been the base of a wayside cross. It is said that the courts of the old Hurstingstone Hundred were held here. The truth probably is that it marked the boundary of the rule of the Abbot of Ramsey, for the monks had a quarry of the same kind of stone and may have set it up as the limit of their jurisdiction.

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