Stiff leaf, bad glass and Baroque monuments.

There will be one or two new posts this week. I apologise that things have been a bit slow of late, I have the good excuse of moving house and settling into a new parish. I had a lovely little excursion last week into Nottinghamshire and one of the churches I visited was Low Marnham, a redundant church in a rather remote area close to the Trent. It's a church I last visited ten years ago when I was working on my thesis, as there are some fragments of exceptionally bad early sixteenth century glass, including this head of St James the Great.



The church itself is very atmospheric, it has a nave with aisles that entered through a sturdy transitional north arcade (see below) and a beautiful Early English south arcade with crisp stiff leaf capitals. The photo at the top of the post shows the centre pier of the north chapel arcade, which is embellished with equally fine stiff leaf. A lot of the outer walls of the church were rebuilt in the sixteenth century and the lights of the north aisle and clerestory windows are topped with the usual depressed arches of that period.



If that's not enough there are a couple of magnificent late seventeenth century Baroque cartouches. The one in the north chapel, dating from the late 1690s, is topped with putti and is supported rather dramatically on two grisly winged skulls.