Down Ampney, Gloucestershire

Crockets

The architectural feature known as the crocket is something that is often viewed from afar. If you don’t know what a crocket is and can’t reach for a convenient copy of The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, I’ll do that for you. ‘A decorative hook-like spur of stone carved in various leaf-shapes and projecting at regular intervals from the angles of spires, pinnacles, gables, canopies, etc., in Gothic architecture.’* That’s how Penguin’s exemplary reference book defines a crocket, although in the vernacular, as it were, I might say, ’The knobbly bits that stick out of the edges of church spires’, and you’d get the idea.

The crockets on church spires are by definition far from the ground and it’s difficult to see their details. When you get your eye in, however, it’s quite often possible to spot crockets near to ground level, as is the case on the pinnacle in my photograph, which adorns a tomb recess in the church at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire. Close-up, you can see that a well carved crocket is far from being a simple ‘knobbly bit’: it’s a flowing, organic-looking decoration that must have demanded considerable skill on the part of the carver. Great precision and a combination of delicacy and strength were required to carve the 20-odd crockets on this pinnacle and the matching finial on the top. To make the whole thing yet more intricate, the lower part of the pinnacle takes the form of a narrow, straight-sided arch, beautifully formed and set off with pairs of human heads that peer at us from the late-14th or 15th century.†  

There was a lot of this sort of thing about from the mid-14th century onwards, as English architecture entered the phase known to historians as Decorated Gothic. Much of it has been lost to the effects of iconoclasm and time – in particular, anything with an image of a human was likely to face the wrath of 17th-century Puritans and be defaced or simply lopped off. This makes the small heads on this example particularly precious survivals. Since much medieval stone carving was also painted in bright colours, there may have been another loss. However, light from the nearby stained-glass window has supplied a hint of colour, bringing a glow to a small marvel of the carver’s art.

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* John Fleming, Hugh Honour and Nikolaus Pevsner, The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penguin Books (5th edition, 1999)

† If you click on the image, a larger version should appear, making some of the details clearer.

Painswick, Gloucestershire

Pointing up, standing out

Painswick, one of the most delightful of Gloucestershire’s small towns, is perhaps not as widely appreciated as Cotswold places like Broadway or Chipping Campden because a main road runs through it and the tight knot of lanes off the main street reveals no village green or market place where people can gather or sit and take in the view. But Painswick has something just as good: the most delightful churchyard for miles, a generous space well populated with beautifully carved (although now very worn) Cotswold stone tombs, interspersed with a small forest of yew trees. There are said to be 99 yew trees, attempts to grow a hundredth having ended in failure; it’s also said that it’s impossible to count them – the total is different every time. I’ve limited myself to admiring the yews without being tempted to put such legends to the test.

There must be dozens of tombs and gravestones, too, many of them dating from the 17th and 128th centuries, when Painswick was at its most prosperous because of the wool trade. Many of the grander tombs commemorate wool merchants or clothiers. One stands out as rather different. It’s this pyramid, which marks the grave not of a clothier but of John Bryan, who carved of many of the monuments in the churchyard. He died in 1787.

It’s often said that the English fascination with ancient Egyptian culture began in the early-19th century, after the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon (in 1798) and the work of Jean-François Champollion, Thomas Young and others on decoding hieroglyphic script. However, Egyptian culture held a fascination for some people in Britain well before this period, and whoever created Bryan’s tomb in the late 1780s was clearly one of these forerunners. True, Bryan’s tomb doesn’t have quite the same proportions as the ‘typical’ Egyptian pyramid – it’s taller and thinner than the Great Pyramid of Giza and its neighbours. Bryan’s pyramid is closer in shape to the pyramids built in late antiquity at Meroe on the upper Nile in Sudan, though I’ve no idea whether they were at all well known in 18th century England. Perhaps the builders just wanted to give the carver’s memorial a little extra height, so that his grave is marked with a monument that can clearly be seen among the clusters ofd lower chest and ‘tea caddy’ tombs that he helped to create.

Ilmington, Warwickshire

Looking ahead

I’d not got far up the churchyard path to St Mary’s, Ilmington, before I saw the extraordinary monument near the church’s south doorway. Once I was a little nearer I began to take it in, and to see what it was: an 18th-century tomb (the date is 1750, it turns out) that aspires to be a miniature building, with a lower section parapeted with castle-like battlements, and the whole thing topped with a lantern-tower and spire.

The masonry of the lower part looks plain at first sight, but close-to one can distinguish some pilasters at the corners topped with tiny cusped blank arches, while the battlements are decorated with quatrefoils that have partly weathered away. The tower is quite elaborate – there are cusped openings all the way around and the spire also has (tiny) windows and a carved finial at the top. It all looks more like the mid-18th-century Gothic that it is, and yet the highly fancy Gothic that Horace Walpole promoted had really only just going – Walpole had begun to remodel his famous house at Strawberry Hill in 1749. 

So who created this forward-looking bit of design? It was built for Ann and Samuel Sansom. Pevsner compares their tomb to the Despenser monuments in Tewkesbury Abbey, and it’s true that some of the Tewkesbury chantry chapels do have similar, if much more ornate, tops. He also directs us to the researches of Howard Colvin, who points out that the Chipping Campden mason-architect Edward Woodward had proposed a similar design of tower and spire, at full scale, for the church at Preston-on-Stour.* It could well be Woodward, experienced in building plainer Gothic structures not far away from here, trying his had at something more adventurous.

If he did, it was admirable, although as I attempted to photograph the miniature building I had to try several angles so as not to get the spire clashing with window mullions and tracery behind. And then it occurred to me that the tomb was sited rather invasively near the church and its entrance. I wondered what the parishioners thought when they had to pass it every Sunday? I like it, but it must have been a bit of a shock, and an enforced reminder of the deceased couple. Let’s hope they were remembered with affection.

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* The Woodwards – Thomas and his son Edward – were certainly on the ball: they were doing very rococo Gothic work at Ascot Park, Warwickshire, in the 1750s. Their proposal for the Preston-on-Stour tower showed a crown-like top like St Nicholas, Newcastle, with the finial designed in the manner of the tomb at Ilmington: amazing. For a reproduction of the drawing, see the recent revised edition of the Warwickshire Pevsner.

Brightling, Sussex

Fit for a king

As promised in the previous post, here is the pyramid in Brightling churchyard, beneath which the local squire, MP. philanthropist, and folly-builder John Fuller was buried when he died in 1834. The pyramid is a substantial stone structure, some 25 ft tall and taking up a large chunk of the southern side of the churchyard. It's similar in shape if not size to the resting places of the Old Kingdom Egyptian kings, but unlike the Egyptian pyramids has an entrance on one side, allowing visitors to peer into the gloomy space within. Fuller built the tomb in 1811, so his friends and neighbours had 23 years in which to get used to the fact that he had chosen this unusual form of monument. It was after his death, however, that the local gossip on the subject seems to have taken hold – in particular a story that Fuller was entombed in the pyramid sitting down at a table with a roast chicken and a bottle of claret. Such unconventionality seemed appropriate to Fuller's larger than life character, and the idea that he was buried with his dinner appeared to fit the ancient notion that the soul would need sustenance on its way to the next world. When the pyramid was restored in 1982, however, the rumours were found to be untrue. The squire is buried in the usual recumbent fashion beneath his pyramid.

Bath, Somerset

A tomb with a view

I make no apologies for returning once more to Bath, especially as on this visit I was drawn to an unusual building that I’d not seen before, high on the outskirts of the city on the way to Bath Racecourse. I knew it was there, I’d read about it and knew some of its history, but my reading hadn’t prepared me for the uncompromising sight that met my eyes.

When I say ‘uncompromising’ I mean that this tower is perhaps of all the buildings I’ve seen in England, most unambiguously, sternly classical. In a way it’s the exact opposite of what one would expect, for this tower was commissioned by the writer, collector, MP, and artistic patron William Beckford, the man who, obsessed with the Middle Ages, had built the most outrageously Gothic country house in the country, Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire.

Beckford, born fabulously wealthy from family sugar plantations in Jamaica, collected ravenously, picking up cheap Italian Renaissance paintings, Asian sculptures, drawings by Blake, and French furniture. He wrote travel books about Italy, Spain, and Portugal, published Vathek, a pioneering Gothic novel, and egged on his architect Wyatt and his builders to finish Fonthill with its enormous tower and vast halls, increasing the workers’ beer allowance and poaching builders from Windsor Castle in the process.

Fonthill was glorious, from its 10-metre-high front doors to the top of its 90-metre tower, but both Beckford’s fortunes and his architecture proved fragile. The tower at Fonthill collapsed. Twice. Beckford lost his sugar plantations in a legal action, and he was forced to leave, and then sell, Fonthill. He retired to Bath, where he had a town house connected by gardens to this tower. The tower, designed in 1825 for Beckford by the young architect H E Goodridge, was designed to house the owner’s books and such treasures as he was able to salvage from his earlier life.

The bottom section of the tower is perfectly plain, then there’s a very strong cornice supporting the belvedere, with its three tall rectangular openings on each side – from here there are glorious views over Bath and the surrounding countryside. Above this, the tower becomes octagonal, with a squat plain octagon supporting the final touch, a gilded lantern. That lantern relieves the severity of the main tower, and gleams in the sunshine, making one think as much of an ancient lighthouse as the Athenian monuments on which the building is partly modelled.

After Beckford died in 1844, his daughter sold the tower, but when she discovered that the new owner was going to turn it into a pub, she bought it back and gave the adjoining ground to the church for a cemetery. Beckford’s own tomb, in pink Aberdeen granite, is in the foreground of the picture. The great connoisseur’s final resting place is next to his final home and visitors come from miles around to enjoy the views from his tower and his tomb.

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The Landmark Trust operates the lower part of the tower as a holiday cottage. The tower also contains a museum that is open regularly. Both of these links contain further information about the tower.

Ewelme, Oxfordshire

Stepping westwards

Alice de la Pole of Ewelme was the grand-daughter of the poet Chaucer and the wife of William de la Pole, who was made Duke of Suffolk in 1448 for his loyalty to the House of Lancaster. It was said that the couple, when not at court or at the de la Pole estate in Suffolk, lived much at Alice’s home village, bringing with them East Anglian retainers whose descendants still live in the area. They probably brought Suffolk craftsmen with them too, because when they rebuilt the church in the 1430s in a rich mixture of flint, stone, and brick, an East Anglian layout was adopted, with wooden screens rather than masonry used to divide the various parts of the building's interior.

One of the treasures of Ewelme church is a font cover built like a staggering spire of wooden tracery. This too looks just like an import from East Anglia, where there are a number of such tall and intricate covers, connected like this one to a pulley, so that they may be raised when the font is needed for a baptism.



In the year William was made Duke, the couple established a chantry, a foundation under which two priests and thirteen poor men were to pray for their souls and celebrate Mass at Ewelme. The priests and poor men were accommodated in an almshouse that William and Alice built near the church and the beautiful south-east chapel of the church was set aside as the place where the cycle of Masses and prayers could be said.

Alice's tomb, now sited in a space between this chapel and the chancel of the church, was installed just before she died in 1475/76. It is one of the most impressive of all 15th-century tombs, with a lifelike alabaster effigy of the deceased, a cadaver beneath (staring at a picture of the Annunciation), a host of angels above, and a row of standing figures – many still with their original painted colour.

Those traces of colour, making vibrant this reminder of mortality, was just one thing that made this building special when I visited it the other day. As the flag flew in the brisk breeze at the back end of April (the Chaucerian month) and the sun blazed through the windows, a group of ringers came to put the bells through their paces, adding music to colour to bring the place sonorously alive.