Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon: A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric — John Shaqi
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon: A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its FabricHallett, Cecil Walter Charles
History
Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Ripon: A Short History of the Church and a Description of Its Fabric
Hallett, Cecil Walter Charles
Ripon Cathedral
=The East Side of the South Transept= has three buttresses, crowned by
pinnacles of which the two nearest to the tower are modern. The central
buttress is much shallower than the others and has a different
termination. The clearstorey displays three well-arched windows of three
lights (the innermost window a little smaller than the others) with
tracery not unlike that in the south aisle of the nave. The parapet is
probably old Decorated work that has been used again, for it has the
wide merlons and cruciform piercings characteristic of early
battlements, and the Perpendicular pinnacles, it will be noticed, are
not in the middle of the merlons. The manner in which the corner of the
tower has been reconstructed is extremely interesting. Up the angle
formed by choir and transept runs a sort of excrescence of masonry that
blossoms out, so to speak, into an extraordinary complication of
corbelling near the top, and is itself corbelled away at the bottom. In
this excrescence, as elsewhere, old materials have been used again, and
in the projecting mass, at the level of both triforium and clearstorey,
are the springings of arches curving eastwards and southwards, which
suggest that the adjoining walls had at first been intended to be on a
more advanced plane, and that the arches of the triforium were to have
been round in the transept (where, by the way, they are recessed) as
they are in the choir. This angle contains the tower staircase, which is
lighted by a little window in the upper corbelling and is reached from
the clearstorey gallery of the transept. On this side of the church the
parapet walk has to be carried round the corners of the tower on
squinches.
[Illustration: RECONSTRUCTED ANGLE OF THE GREAT TOWER, (SOUTH TRANSEPT
AND CHOIR.)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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