Lyminster Again

[poliphilo]

The guy who's taking my mother's funeral was once rector of Dunsfold and Hascombe in Surrey- and boasts that he was thereby in charge of one five hundredth of the best churches in England. The reference is to Simon Jenkins' England's Thousand Best Churches- (the church crawler's Bible)- in which both Dunsfold and Hascombe make the cut.

I refer to Jenkins all the time- and I've never known him recommend a dud (Dunsfold desrves its place for overall prettiness and Hascombe for being bonkers in the way only the Victorians could manage) but I've sometimes visited an unlisted church and thought, "How could he have overlooked this?" St Mary Magdalene, Lyminster is a case in point. If it were up to me it would get at least one star for its Saxon arch, its Knucker screen and its connection to a rattling good yarn.

Here's the arch.



It's often said that the invention of the pointed arch allowed builders to go high, but not having the pointed arch didn't stop the Saxons and Normans from soaring, now did it?

Comments

[cmcmck]

You'd love St Mary the Virgin, Bromfield just down the road from us- it's medieval but got a bizarre baroque makeover:

[poliphilo]

That looks like fun!

[cmcmck]

It was the church of Bromfield Priory. Just the church and the gatehouse survive.

[poliphilo]

I used to think Thomas Cromwell had made a clean sweep of the monasteries- leaving nothing but ruins- but I've since learned- through assiduous church-crawling- that a very large number of monastic churches were repurposed as cathedrals and parish churches- by favourite example being the great abbey church at Tewkesbury.

[cmcmck]

My home cathedral, Rochester, was a monastic church.