Church Of All Saints

The Church of All Saints is a parish church with origins dating back to the 12th century, but significantly altered in the 14th and 15th centuries, and again in 1854 and 1878. It is constructed of flint, pebble stone, clunch rubble, and dressed clunch and limestone, with steeply pitched tiled roofs. The church comprises a west tower, a nave, a south chapel, and a chancel.

The west tower, of the 14th century, stands three stages high and is embattled, featuring a needle spine and three-stage set-back buttressing. The west window has two lights with reticulated tracery in a two-centred head. Original cinquefoil windows with clunch surrounds flank the first stage, while the bell chamber openings are restorations. The nave’s south wall features a window of three cinquefoil lights with vertical tracery, and another window of Ketton stone, restored in the 19th century. A gabled, timbered porch, dating to 1878, stands on the south side, with a plain tiled roof and a brick plinth that incorporates a late Saxon cross-slab with plaitwork decoration.

The south chapel, from the 15th century, is built of flint, pebble stone, clunch, and limestone, with brick repairs to the west wall. It is embattled and features a double splayed plinth, incorporating fragments of Saxon cross-slabs in the west wall. The chancel was restored in 1878, and a lean-to north vestry, dating back to the 15th century, adjoins it. The north wall of the vestry is of early 18th-century narrow gault brick, and the east window is of clunch. The north wall of the nave retains an early 12th-century window above a blocked north doorway of the same period.

Inside, the roof is 19th century. A tablet and numerous late 18th or early 19th century wall monuments are found on the north wall of the nave, placed there when the chancel arch was rebuilt in 1854. Within the north wall of the chancel are two recesses: one from the 13th century and the other from the 14th century, with ogee arched heads, crocketed pinnacles, and a possible effigy of Sir John de Freville, who died in 1308. The south chapel contains two 15th-century niches with ogee arched heads, running foliate ornament, and crocketed pinnacles above a seated alabaster figure of a saint. The niche in the north east corner is damaged, with only part of the figured bracket remaining. A 1633 pulpit, six-sided with blank arches and a foliate frieze, is also present. The font is of stone, dating to the 13th century, consistng of an octagonal bowl on an octagonal principal column with four subsidiary octagonal columns. The south chapel holds 18th and 19th century wall monuments dedicated to members of the Ingle family.