Church Of St Nicholas

Church of St Nicholas

This parish church dates from circa 1300 and later. It comprises a nave, chancel, west tower, south aisle and south porch, constructed mainly in rubble flint with a small admixture of freestone. Freestone provides dressings and facings to some buttresses. The roofs were originally thatched until the early 20th century, now covered in stone slates. The south aisle has a separate gabled roof.

The church is said to have been built by Edmund Gonville, founder of Gonville Hall (later Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), who was rector here circa 1340. The building is particularly notable for its very fine windows. The east window contains a 5-light composition with fragments of 14th-century glass and a 3-light west window, both featuring cusped intersecting tracery. Two 2-light windows appear on the south wall: one with pointed-trefoiled lights and three circles with quatrefoils in the head, similar to the south windows at Rickinghall Inferior.

The south porch is plain with diagonal buttresses and a simple pointed arch to the doorway. It contains two Y-tracery windows with hood-moulds and has a shallow-pitched roof with a gable-end cross. The south doorway features quarter-round mouldings, leaf capitals, and an empty cinquefoil-headed niche above.

The 5-light east window in the chancel displays an unusual variant of intersecting tracery, with ogee arches to the lights and small motifs interpolated in some of the intersecting fields. The tower rises in three stages with an embattled stone parapet. A 2-light Perpendicular west window is set above an empty niche. Each face of the second stage contains a small circular quatrefoil window, and 2-light windows with intersecting heads appear to the top stage.

The interior was much restored in 1872, when the pulpit and seating were replaced, and again in 1895, when the chancel was reroofed in Spanish chestnut. Many older features survive: a simple octagonal font stands on a large plain column with a low raised base. The doorways and stair to the rood loft behind the pulpit remain visible. A 14th-century arcade in four bays runs along the south side, featuring octagonal piers without capitals and quarter-round mouldings to the arches.

In the south-east corner of the aisle stands a fine angle piscina (restored) with naturalistic foliage, a pointed trefoil arch enriched with dog-tooth ornament, and a gable with ballflower. Piscina and sedilia also appear in the chancel. Both the chancel and south aisle contain medieval stone altars with recut consecration crosses, which were reinstated during the 1895 restoration.

A large squint at the south-east end of the nave has a small brass inscription to Anne Caley (c.1500) below it. On the south wall of the aisle sits an alabaster and marble monument to Henry Buckenham (died 1648) and his wife Dorothy (died 1645): two demi-figures occupy an arched niche with looped-up curtains, while their son and daughter appear below in oval niches. On the north wall of the nave is an 18th-century wooden panel carved in high relief with the Flight into Egypt, probably Italian in origin.

The windows contain a particularly large amount of old crown and cylinder glass. In the floor of the base of the tower are three small black tiles set diamondwise, variously inscribed WR1735, SR1744 and ER1721.