Survivor
In the large village of Sherston in Wiltshire, roughly east of Malmesbury, this graceful medieval church stands at one end of the town. The church has a Norman core and was extended in the 13th and 15th centuries. The tall tower at first glance looks like one of the 15th-century additions, its style not a million miles from the more ornate church towers of Somerset. The openwork parapet at the top, the pointed openings with pierced stone panels to let out the sound of the bells, the niche for a statue – all these are things you can also see on 15th-century Somerset towers. Only the two little windows right at the bottom of the tower beneath the niche strike an odd note.
And those windows give a clue to what is different about the tower at Sherston: it dates not from the 15th century but from 1730. It was the work of a master mason called Thomas Sumsion, who came from Colerne, which, although in Wiltshire, is quite close to Bath and the world of those stunning Somerset towers. Sumsion worked very much in the medieval tradition. In 1730 George II was on the throne and classical architecture in the vein of St Martin in the Fields was all the rage. So the Gothic style of Sumsion’s tower here at Sherston was unfashionable in 1730 – maybe 250 years out of date.
But this kind of work was what Sumsion had learned, perhaps from his father, who had learned it in turn from an earlier generation. They’d no doubt continued building country buildings in the Gothic style through the Elizabethan period, through the Classical age of Inigo Jones and Christopher Wren, and into the Georgian period. This phenomenon is known to historians as the Gothic survival. At Sherston it makes you feel pleased that Gothic survived in this way. Thomas Sumsion produced a tower of particular beauty and grace.
