Inglesham, Wiltshire

Perceptions of the doors (2)

The door of 78, Derngate, subject of the previous post, is a very arresting example of the way in which a door can act as a symbol of the building to which it gives entry, signalling what we can expect inside. Here’s another door, at the tiny parish church of Inglesham in Wiltshire. Although my photograph shows only part of it, even this few square feet of timber and couple of bits of ironmongery speak volumes.

Inglesham is an isolated medieval country church, wholly unspoiled by the kind of 19th-century restoration that affected so many English churches. As I explained in an earlier post, the preservation of this church was in large part due to William Morris, who lived not far away at Kelmscott and supported the building’s sensitive conservation. Thanks to Morris, the building retains its patina of age and reads as an architectural palimpsest, containing as it does stonework and woodwork of a range of periods between the Saxon and the Jacobean, plus a variety of fragments of wall paintings, sometimes overlapping and fading into one another, to create an interior that is both fascinating and moving.

The door signals the sensitivity with which this church has been preserved. According to the principles of the SPAB, of which Morris was co-founder, when a repair is necessary, a minimum of the old fabric is removed and the new material is fitted to the old, not the other way around; in addition, there should not be any attempt at disguising the new material by fake ‘antiquing’ or distressing. These principles seem to have been followed with the woodwork of this door – just a sliver of weak or rotting wood has been taken away and a narrow fillet of timber inserted. It’s clear that it’s more recent, but that doesn’t matter – the difference helps make the history of the fabric clear.

At some point the door also needed a new handle. Again, the principle is, don’t fake a medieval handle, use something that’s modern, but works. That’s not a call for a piece of Bauhaus-inspired door furniture on a medieval door, though this handle has a simplicity and economy and kindness to the hand that Gropius and his Bauhausers would have admired. It’s just a bent strip of metal, but it’s elegant and it works. I wonder when it was fitted on the door? In Morris’s time? Later, perhaps, given the screw fixing? I don’t know. It’s timeless, and efficient, and makes a minimum impact on the ancient timber of the door. It remains true, too, to the spirit of tactful conservation that this wonderful building embodies.

Note This church is cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust.


St John the Baptist, Inglesham, exterior

Inglesham, Wiltshire

More layers

I recently did a couple of posts called ‘Layers of history’ about places constructed on prehistoric sites. As more than one reader said, this whole blog is really about layers of history – and they could have gone further and said that virtually every building that’s not spick and span new is an example of historical layering, so great is our passion for altering and adapting buildings, furnishing them and leaving our stamp on them. The tiny church at Inglesham in Wiltshire is one of the most layered of them all. A largely 13th-century structure, based probably on a late-Saxon original, it contains a Saxon carving of the Madonna and Child, windows from the 14th and 15th centuries, timber screens of the 15th and 16th centuries, 17th-century pews and pulpit, and a range of wall paintings representing every century from the 13th to the 19th.

Nave and aisle: 13th-century pier, 15th-century screen, Jacobean pews

But that prosaic list tells not half the story. This isolated church – it has just a couple of houses for company down a lane that leads nowhere else – has an atmosphere of quiet and calm like few others, testimony to the care that has been lavished on its fragile fabric and furnishings, especially over the last century or so. That it has survived is largely due to William Morris, who lived at Kelmscott not far away, loved this place, and knew the Victorian rector, Oswald Birchall. Birchall wrote to Morris saying that he had no money to carry out the necessary repairs to the church, and neither had the parishioners. Morris put Birchall in touch with the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, who both supervised the restoration in the 1880s and 1890s and, in an unusual move, also raised money for it. Morris too contributed money, anonymously, to keep the work going. And so the repairs were carried out with the greatest care and respect for the building, under SPAB principles – nothing old was destroyed if it could be repaired, new work was not disguised, new additions were made to fit the old fabric (not the other way round), and so on.

As a result of Morris’s commitment, this wonderful church survives, with both its historical layers and its ancient peace. On my last visit to Inglesham I was enjoying the building in solitude when the door opened and a party of half a dozen visitors came in. Frankly, my heart sank. No more contemplative silence, I thought. How wrong could I be? Each of the visitors approached the chancel, bowed towards the altar, and made the sign of the cross, before inspecting the building in awed reverence. After a while, one of them came up to me. ‘They are from Warsaw,’ he explained, in good but accented English. ‘They have been to the Tower of London and Windsor, so I had to bring them here. To show them this unbroken link with the Middle Ages, even with the Saxons.’ An unbroken link with the layers of history. And one of the best. How true.

Chancel: Fragment of 13th-century reredos, painting of various dates

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Note A commenter has pointed out that conservation work is now (20 August 2010) underway on some of the wall paintings at Inglesham. This means that there is a lot of scaffolding in the church and the opening times are restricted.

This church is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, which looks after churches of historical and architectural interest that are no longer needed for worship. They deserve our support.