Highways and Byways in LincolnshireRawnsley, W. F. (Willingham Franklin)
History
Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire
Rawnsley, W. F. (Willingham Franklin)
Lincolnshire (England) -- Description and travel
The tower has three stages, Early English, Decorated and
Perpendicular. The south door is transition Norman, the north arcade
aisle and chancel Early English, the south arcade and aisle Decorated,
and the font, screen and clerestory Perpendicular. In this the six tall
two-light windows are distributed in pairs. _Rowston_, which is dedicated
to St. Clement, has a spire rising from a tall tower, so little wider
than itself that it may safely be said to cover less ground than any
tower in England, for it measures only five and a-half feet inside; it
is blank except for a rather heavy window in the upper stage. The first
thing that strikes you on entering is the extraordinary loud ticking of
the clock. It has to be stopped during service, as no one can compete
with it. The next thing is that the thirteen windows are all filled
with painted glass and of the same type, striking in design, though not
of quite first-rate excellence. One window has figures of the three
Lincolnshire saints—St. Guthlac, St. Hugh, and St. Gilbert. The church
is in very good order, having been recently restored, and some Saxon
stones with interlaced work have been built into the outside wall of
the chancel. It would have been better to have put these inside. But
there is inside a very good head of a churchyard or village cross, and
the base and broken shaft of one, possibly the same, is just outside
the churchyard. This head is of the usual penthouse form, with a carved
figure on either side; it was found quite recently built into a cowshed.
In the nave the pillars are all different. The vestry was over the burial
chapel of the Foster family; later it was, as was so often the case, used
for a school. A beautiful bit of an old carved oak screen separates it
now from the north aisle. A heavy timber floor cuts across the top of the
tall tower arch, and below a very curious pillar stands against one side
of the arch. An Early English priest’s door, with a flat-arched lintel,
is in the south wall of the chancel. It is impossible to walk round the
slender tower, as a garden wall runs into it on both the north and south
sides, leaving part of the tower in a neighbouring garden, the owner of
which once claimed half the tower as his property, and considered that
he had a right to pierce a door through it for easier access to his pew.
[Sidenote: GRANTHAM ROAD]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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