Church Of All Saints

A parish church of ironstone with brick and ashlar dressings, slate roofs, and a lead broach spire, dating from the 14th century with significant additions and alterations spanning the 17th, 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.

The church comprises a west tower, nave, chancel, and north and south porches.

The west tower is 14th-century work with a moulded plinth and three stages separated by chamfered string courses. Its west side features a giant recessed pointed arch, double chamfered and without capitals. The underside is diagonally vaulted with four facetted ribs resting on grotesque head corbels. The west tower window contains three cusped trefoil lights with flowing double daggers in the upper parts and a quatrefoil above. The middle stage is blank. The belfry stage displays four paired trefoil-headed openings with quatrefoils above, recessed beneath chamfered arches. The octagonal spire rises as a broach from a square splayed base and is decorated with raised rolled ribs in a lattice pattern. The spire was apparently re-erected in 1784, though it underwent repair in 1621 and may therefore be of pre-Reformation date.

The north wall of the nave is divided into three bays by narrow stepped buttresses. The west bay contains a 14th-century three-light flowing traceried window, recut in the 19th century. The middle bay has a door covered by a blocked late 18th-century rusticated brick porch with a keystone pediment. The east bay holds a 14th-century three-light window with an ogee head flanked by trefoils and flowing tracery.

The 14th-century chancel consists of two bays marked by stepped buttresses, each containing a single three-light flowing traceried window with an ogee head flanked by trefoils. The east chancel window has angled buttresses and a single 14th-century three-light flowing traceried light with trefoil heads. The south chancel wall has two bays; the more easterly contains a partially recut 14th-century window with a pointed head and a door with recut but moulded surround and hoodmould. The western bay holds a three-light 14th-century window.

The south wall of the nave comprises three bays. The outer pair contain 14th-century three-light windows. The central bay is covered by a brick rusticated porch with a plinth, band, and dropped keystone and pediment, obscuring a 14th-century pointed-headed door with two orders of sunk wave mouldings and a moulded hood. At the west end of the south wall of the nave is an angle staircase providing access to the tower, supported across the angle by a corbel stone bearing a small beast head.

Inside, the tower arch matches that outside with two chamfered orders. A pointed-headed door to the south affords access to the tower via the external stair. The chancel arch is also 14th-century and unusually features two continuous chamfered orders terminating in square bases.

The roofs and fittings are predominantly 19th-century. However, the church retains a very fine late 18th-century organ by James Wyatt, turned altar rails of circa 1700, and a superb late 17th-century lectern in the customary form of an eagle but with unusual embellishments of scrolly brackets and putti heads. The font is of marble, dated 1948.

The chancel contains two fine 17th-century monuments. On the south side is a monument to William Pelham, knight, died 1629, showing him and his lady reclining on a rich tomb chest. Depicted on the chest are fourteen children kneeling and three chrisms beneath three semicircular-headed arches, the rear panels of which feature coloured marble veneers. At the knight's feet is a peacock, and at his lady's is a Moorish king's head. The other monument to William Pelham shows him and his wife kneeling opposite one another, he with three sons and she with three, flanked by three Corinthian columns. The centre contains a carved and painted shield of arms.

Among later monuments, that to Charles Pelham, Lord Worsley, killed at Flanders in 1914, is notable for being executed in a pleasing 17th-century style. The north wall of the nave displays a full-length sculpture of Marcia, Countess of Yarborough, with two children, died 1926, and a vigorous plaque to Charles, 4th Earl of Yarborough, died 1936, depicting his arms and three roundels showing the deceased flanked by Masonic insignia and a view of Lincoln Cathedral.