Church Of St Michael And All Angels, Including The Detached Bell Tower

Church of St Michael and All Angels, including the Detached Bell Tower

Church dating from the 12th to 18th centuries. Built in red sandstone with a plain tiled roof.

The church comprises a nave of six bays and choir with side aisles, a separate north chapel (now called the Chapter House, formerly the Chapel of St Katherine), a northwest porch and vestry with two upper rooms, and a detached bell tower with spire.

Norman work survives at the west front, including the door surround with chevrons applied to both the outer face and the intrados of the relieving arch, meeting at right angles. The door has three shafts to each side with carved capitals featuring masks that bite into the shafts. At the west end of the north arcade, the nave includes the bases of four large round pillars (approximately 5 feet in diameter) from an early Norman building. The choir has similar columns rising to full height with scalloped heads. Above these are circular windows which formerly created a clerestory above low side aisles but now open onto the heightened aisles. A corbel table above once formed part of the exterior. The chancel arch has capitals showing the height at which the former aisle arches sprang. At the far east end of the chancel are two round-headed lateral windows. The chancel contains an Easter sepulchre, aumbries and a piscina.

The north aisle dates from the 13th century and has Geometrical windows at its east and west ends featuring quatrefoils within circles, while the north windows comprise three stepped lancet lights. The south aisle is entirely 14th century, including its nave arcade which has octagonal columns with concave faces. The tracery consists of intersecting Y-shapes with cusps. The north chapel dates from circa 1320 and contains large four-light windows with complex tracery indicating the transition from Decorated to Perpendicular style. Numerous small ball flowers are attached to this tracery, of the type seen at Leominster, suggesting work by the same craftsmen but slightly later in date.

The separate bell tower dates from circa 1230 in its lowest three stages, constructed with rubble walls and ashlar to the broad angle buttresses. The lower stages have lancets, and the third stage features a trio of lancets spanning its width with louvres to the central opening on each side. Nathaniel Wilkinson of Worcester added a further stage above, featuring a single cusped louvred light to each side, a deep cornice and battlements. Behind the battlements rises a slender octagonal stone spire with bead mouldings to the corners and flush lucarnes to the alternating faces.

The church contains monuments of exceptional quality spanning multiple periods. These include a 13th-century effigy of a Benedictine monk, originally a coffin lid now standing upright in the north chapel; a 14th-century altar tomb to a female member of the Carew family with naturalistically carved drapery falling over the tomb edge; the canopied monument to Edward and Elizabeth Skynner of 1630; monuments to Daniel Ellis Saunders (died 1825) by Westmacott; William Miles (died 1803) by Flaxman; and Robert Middleton Biddulph (died 1814), also by Westmacott. The west end of the south aisle is railed off to form a chapel containing reclining monuments to Anthony Biddulph (died 1718) and his wife Constance (died 1706).