The rood-loft has been reconstructed (but without a rood) and I do not think it has improved the church. However small a church may be, the rood-loft must be large enough for people to pass along it to the rood, and may thus be very much too large to suit the church. And this new rood-loft looks too large, though Bovey church is not so very small. Most churches, I suspect, looked all the better for the compromise of 10 October 1561, which took away their rood-lofts and left them their screens. By this compromise the rood-loft is to be “so altered that the upper part of the same, with the soller, be quite taken down unto the upper parts of the vaults and beam running in length over the said vaults ... putting some convenient crest upon the said beam.” If the rood-loft has already been removed and “there remain a comely partition betwixt the chancel and the church,” no alteration is to be attempted; but “where no partition is standing,” a partition must be built. In this district the screens usually are woodwork, elaborately carved: very few are stone. The beam is eight or ten feet from the ground, and is supported by uprights three or four feet apart; and between the uprights there is solid panelling to a height of about three feet, and then open tracery for the rest of the height, making a sort of Gothic window with its arched head touching the beam and springing from the uprights two or three feet below. At the springing of these arched window-heads there were segments of arches, springing out on each side of the screen, and combining with the window-heads to form a kind of vaulting underneath the soller, or rood-loft floor. The rood-loft was approached by a staircase in the thickness of the wall or in a little turret outside, with entrance and exit both inside the church; and where the rood-loft has been taken down, the exit leads out on to the little pinnacles of the ‘crest’ of the beam; and then the effect is comic, as no one but a rope-dancer could ever walk along them. It is so in Lustleigh church and in many others. On the Lustleigh screen there are carvings of pomegranates--the badge of Aragon--and possibly the screen dates from the time of Catherine of Aragon or her daughter. But the pomegranates have their sides cut open to show the grains inside, and thus look very like bunches of grapes with leaves enclosing them. In early Christian art palm-trees grew into candlesticks with candles in them, the leaves becoming the flame; and I rather suspect a similar transformation here.