No reading required (no. 1)
'Jonathan Meades: Worcestershire' from Travels with Pevsner (1998)
Monday, 11 July 2011
Sunday, 10 July 2011
St Winifred's Church - Manaton, Devon (8 July 2011)
On the hill slope higher up is the village. Here are thatched walls too and cob cottages with rounded corners and bulging hearths and hollyhocks and fuchsias in the garden. Out of the sycamores near the hill top peep the tall pinnacles of a thin church tower. Inside the church, low 15th-century arcades of clustered columns support a barrel-shaped wooden roof whose timbers are carved. And right across the east end, for we do not expect to see a chancel arch in Devon, will be a wooden screen with carved base and painted Saints on its panels, and through the wooden tracery above the panels we can see the altar.
Devon - Introduction from John Betjeman (ed.), Collins Guide to English Parish Churches (London, 1958), p. 136.
And Northlew Church is full of that carved woodwork that is characteristic of that age of faith in Devon when farms prospered and wool sold well and men gave their best - because everyone believed that Christ was God - to the grandest building in the parish: the church...
John Betjeman, 'In the West Country with John Betjeman' from Wales and the West (ITV, shown 17 September 1962)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)