The work of all these towers is pre-Norman, and it is not unlikely that the church, when first built, consisted of only a tower and two apses. At Hough, as at Broughton, we have attached to the west face of the tower a Saxon circular turret staircase, built in the rudest way and coped with a sloping top of squared masonry, of apparently Norman work. The tower has several very small lights, 12 to 15 inches high, and of various shapes, while the west side of the south porch is pierced with a light which only measures 8 inches by 4, but is framed with dressed stone on both the wall-surfaces. The two lower stages of the square tower, to whose west face the round staircase-tower clings, are all of the same rough stone-work, with wide mortar joints, but with two square edged thick string-courses of dressed stone, projecting 6 inches or more. The upper stage is of much later date. The Early English nave, chancel, and aisles are very high, and are no less than 20 feet wide, mercifully (for it was proposed to abolish them and substitute a pine roof) they still retain their old Perpendicular roofs with the chancel and nave timbers enriched with carving. The sedilia are of the rudest possible construction. [Illustration: _Hough-on-the-Hill._] [Sidenote: A SAXON TOWER] The staircase turret has two oblong Saxon windows, like those at Barnack, about four feet by one, in the west face, three small round lights on the north, and four on the south, one square and one diamond-shaped and two circular. The turret is of the same date as the tower, but appears to have been built on after the tower was finished; and it almost obscures the two little west windows of the tower, one on each side of it, and near the top. A round-headed doorway leads from the tower to the turret, inside which the good stone steps lead up to a triangular-headed door into the tower, where now is the belfry floor, from which another similar doorway leads into the nave. Close to the top of the old Saxon tower walls are very massive stone corbels for supporting the roof. The Newel post of the old tower is a magnificent one, being eighteen inches thick. This, where the upper stage was added, is continued, but with only half that thickness. There was once a porch with a higher pitched roof, as shown by the gable roof-mould against the aisle. On the stone benches are three of the solitaire-board devices, with eight hollows connected by lines all set in an oblong, the same that you see often in cloisters and on the stone benches at Windsor, where monks or chorister boys passed the time playing with marbles. It is a truly primitive and world-wide amusement. The natives of Madagascar have precisely the same pattern marked out on boards, seated round which, and with pebbles which they move like chessmen, they delight themselves, both young and old, in gambling.