the western end of either wall. Mr. Hodgson Fowler, who discovered the foundations of the chancel, also discovered other foundations, presumably of Saxon date, to the east of the tower, which seem to suggest that a larger building with an elongated plan was in contemplation, but was superseded by a compact plan which found itself centralised in the space allotted to the tower.[32] A somewhat similar plan occurs at Broughton, a village some four miles west of Brigg, and close to the line of Roman road which led from Lincoln to the Humber. Here the fabric has none of those distinctively Saxon features which are found at Barton; it is almost certainly a work of later date. The eastern wall of the tower, as at Barton, has been absorbed in the breadth of an aisled nave of a later period; but the eastern quoins are still visible, continuing to the ground, and indicating that the tower was once broader than the portion of the building east of it. That this eastern building, moreover, was small, and that the bulk of the congregation occupied the space west of it, is suggested by the fact that, as in many later chancel arches, decorative treatment—too rude here to be taken very seriously as architectural membering, in spite of its efforts—is confined to the western face of the arch by which the chancel was approached from the tower-space. Here, then, we have once more the tower-space forming the main area for worship, with a small chancel to the east. At Broughton, however, instead of the corresponding western annexe which we find at Barton, there is a large three-quarter-circular projection, containing a newel staircase which leads to the belfry stage of the tower; and, instead of the two doorways at Barton, there is only one, this time in the south wall. The western projection at Broughton is often ridiculously called a western apse. It is, and always was, a turret for a staircase. Three other such turrets exist. One, at Brixworth in Northamptonshire, was added in front of an earlier western doorway, when the original porch of the basilican church was heightened into a tower. Another, at Brigstock in the same county, forms an integral part of a western tower with strongly Saxon features; its staircase was always of wood, as may have been originally the case at Broughton.[33] The third instance is in Lincolnshire, at Hough-on-the-Hill, seven or eight miles north of Grantham. Here the stair turret is part of a western tower of more than probably pre-Conquest date, and of proportions as ample as those of Earl’s Barton; and one is tempted to discover a parallel to Broughton, and another quasi-parallel to Barton-on-Humber. But the face which the tower presents to the church behind it is singularly blank; and it remains to be seen whether there lie hid, beneath the plaster, quoins, like those at Broughton, to indicate the existence of a chancel whose foundations may still be buried beneath the western floor of the nave.