Holy Trinity,Weston.
Cement wrapped surprise.
In the rich gentle countryside of the north of the county the church lies hidden at the end of a lane going nowhere. By the path to the church stand two low stones; this is the tomb of outlaw giant Jack O’Legs, caught stealing flour for the hungry and hung in Baldock two miles away. His last request was to be buried wherever his last shot from the gallows fell, and the arrow landed here, handily right in a graveyard.
Unprepossessing in its harsh coat of cement, the view from the south promises little. The central tower is workaday Victorian, and the chancel we glimpse obviously brick. Even the porch is a dismal welcome, covered with concrete with the blankest of doors. If ever a church looked locked this is it, and it’s the greatest surprise to be proved to be wrong. The vista in the aisle comes as a shock, spacial complexity in a blank box. For this is a Norman church complete with its crossing, each of its arms of a different style. Under the tower are four sturdy simple round Norman arches set in the thickest of walls, open to all sides. The north transept is untouched too with the simplest of Norman windows in west and north walls, though divided from the crossing by a poor modern glass screen which should be removed. A blocked eastern arch in here is the ghost of an apse, and the south transept was similarly shorn, though rebuilding has hidden the loss. At one time the church must have had three apses to the east, unusually grand for a parish church.
Cement wrapped surprise.
In the rich gentle countryside of the north of the county the church lies hidden at the end of a lane going nowhere. By the path to the church stand two low stones; this is the tomb of outlaw giant Jack O’Legs, caught stealing flour for the hungry and hung in Baldock two miles away. His last request was to be buried wherever his last shot from the gallows fell, and the arrow landed here, handily right in a graveyard.
Unprepossessing in its harsh coat of cement, the view from the south promises little. The central tower is workaday Victorian, and the chancel we glimpse obviously brick. Even the porch is a dismal welcome, covered with concrete with the blankest of doors. If ever a church looked locked this is it, and it’s the greatest surprise to be proved to be wrong. The vista in the aisle comes as a shock, spacial complexity in a blank box. For this is a Norman church complete with its crossing, each of its arms of a different style. Under the tower are four sturdy simple round Norman arches set in the thickest of walls, open to all sides. The north transept is untouched too with the simplest of Norman windows in west and north walls, though divided from the crossing by a poor modern glass screen which should be removed. A blocked eastern arch in here is the ghost of an apse, and the south transept was similarly shorn, though rebuilding has hidden the loss. At one time the church must have had three apses to the east, unusually grand for a parish church.
In this transept the windows are early Perpendicular, with colourful glass that makes a good backdrop for the baptistery created here. The font stands in the centre with modern benches lining the walls. The south aisle which runs into it has been further raised in the 1840s, and now encloses the clerestory, but both the original large mediaeval corbels and their Victorian fellows have a verve and character only partly due to their size. In the south aisle and transept are demons and monsters, acrobats and toads, pulling their mouths, crawling down walls and grinning with tusks. Here as in the nave demi-figures and devils hold up the roofs: the old crowned nobles, fat bellied merchants in hoods and wives in buttoned best dress acting the atlas this last six hundred years. The nave seems tall, even though it is covered with a flat ceiling divided up into panels by beams and bosses, all recently repainted; over the arcade to the south the clerestory opens to the aisle, but from west and north light streams in, contrasting with the dark aisle and darker crossing to the east through which the chancel can be seen.
This too has its riches, denigrated as presumptuous by Pevsner for daring to out-do the humble crossing with brick neo-Norman, though I think that both spaces can stand up for themselves and indeed act as a foil; one of the joys of the best Victorian architects is their overwhelming self confidence: they - like the Normans - had the courage of their convictions. The chancel is richly gloomy, with a circular window over the round arched doorway in the centre of the south wall; the nineteenth century Romanesque windows have bright medallions of the early gothic revival, the sort that they liked before getting too polite. From the open timber arches of the roof ornate gilded pendants hang from the hammerbeams of a Tudor style roof fit for the great hall of a royal palace. How the later Victorians must have hated this anachronistic pizzazz, especially the bullying style police of the Ecclesiological Society who wanted everything Middle Pointed and within the rules. Over the door to the northern vestry is the only memorial of any size in the church, to John Faireclough, +1630, worth looking at for the elegantly mannerist angels at the top.
Returning outside to round the church, it is the hidden north side that is the more picturesque. The bleak expanse of the coat of cement is broken up on the nave by buttresses, windows and doorway, and the Norman transept is free of its embrace. There’s a small brick vestry built in keeping with the chancel, surprisingly so given its addition forty years on. On this side of the chancel the headstops are undamaged, and gurn in a suitably bug eyed way. The south side of the chancel is symmetrical about the round arched priest’s door and the oculus above, with one window to each side: originally stuccoed, stripped back to brick when the vestry was built. Over the crossing the tower is later Victorian, with a nice fat cockerel on the wind vane. If the cement render was swapped for ochre limewash, the outside of the church would stand up to the in.
An unexpectedly good country church, always open, found at the end of Church Lane off Maiden Street east of the village.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.
An unexpectedly good country church, always open, found at the end of Church Lane off Maiden Street east of the village.
All rights reserved for this entire site. Copyright reserved to stiffleaf for all text and images, which may not be reproduced without my permission.