Catholic Church of Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen, Lynford

Catholic Church of Our Lady of Consolation and St Stephen, Lynford

A Roman Catholic church completed in 1878 to the designs of Henry Clutton.

The church is built in coursed, circular knapped flint with limestone dressings, with a roof of plain tiles. The internal walls are faced in ashlar limestone.

The plan consists of a single cell with internal divisions forming a western narthex and an eastern sanctuary. A single storey presbytery passage runs along the south side.

The church presents itself as a rectangular building of four bays with a pitched roof and gabled ends, described as having the appearance of a reliquary. The walls are supported by stepped side buttresses, and at the west end stands a large central buttress supporting a circular bell turret. A pierced and traceried parapet runs along the north and south sides, with bands of stone marking the plinth, sill and eaves levels. Windows are tall and narrow with perpendicular tracery—one to each bay—set beneath segmental arches.

The entrance is positioned at the west end of the north elevation within a square hood moulding with exaggerated hoodstops. The vertical plank door has applied mouldings forming square panels. Above it sits a canopied niche housing a Baroque figure of the Virgin and Child.

The bell turret rises through two tiers of blind and pierced tracery panels, eight in total, surmounted by a conical spirelet and a wrought iron cross.

A single storey passageway connects to the former presbytery from the third bay on the south side. The passageway is four bays long with narrow rectangular window openings and an external entrance at its west end.

The side buttresses contain inset decorative panels at their bases of Romanesque design, dating to the late eleventh century and probably brought from Thetford. Some are figurative and represent rare examples of pre-1100 sculpture in Norman Norfolk.

Internally, a single bay narthex is separated from the nave by an oak screen with perpendicular tracery. Within the narthex stands an elaborately ornamented harmonium and a platform for a vestment chest. Above the doorway is an alabaster figure of the Virgin and Child, and a marble angel offers a stoup by the side of the door.

The nave is furnished with oak pews, their ends carved with blind tracery and quartrefoils. Brass candlesticks project from the walls.

Two curving sanctuary steps are paved with mosaic tiles and support a curved brass altar rail above panels of linked quatrefoils within iron frames rather than a balustrade. The risers are marble and the sanctuary pavement is again tiled with elaborate mosaic patterns. The altar, reredos and tabernacle are richly ornamented with late Gothic ornament and tracery, flanked by iron riddel brackets.

All the glass is the work of Mayer & Co. of Munich and London, with two windows on the south side signed. The north and south sides feature windows depicting various saints in single lights. The pair of two-light windows on the west wall show the four evangelists, and the four-light east window contains scenes of the Annunciation, Visitation, Nativity and Flight into Egypt.

The timber ceiling is ribbed and barrel vaulted, springing from a string course populated with head-corbels, above which runs an embattled frieze of traceried panels.

On the south side of the nave, next to the altar rail, a square-headed door leads to the presbytery passage. The passage, which is clear glazed, no longer connects to the former presbytery.