Church Of St Paul

Church of St Paul, Filleugh

A parish church built in 1732 on a new site, incorporating some fabric from an older church that originally stood closer to Castle Hill House. The building was substantially remodelled in 1876-7 by Clark of Newmarket, converting it from its original Classical style into the Norman style.

The exterior is built of roughly coursed stone rubble to the west tower and nave, with dressed stone to the south aisle and chancel. It has a red clay tile roof with fishscale banding and coped gable ends. The plan comprises a west tower, nave, short transepts, south aisle, and apsidal chancel. The west tower is in two stages with a spire added in the late 19th century, featuring diagonal buttresses and a Lombard frieze to the parapets. The Norman style bell openings on each face are round-arched with engaged columns and scalloped capitals. The west window is a 3-light Perpendicular design incorporating some 15th-century stonework, as does the round-arched west doorway with scalloped capitals and pieced-in jambs.

The nave, north transept, and chancel windows are all round-arched single lights with Norman style mouldings applied to the original Georgian openings. The chancel windows feature a continuous cable hoodmould. The gabled south porch has an external stair turret to the organ gallery on its west side. Above the south porch doorway is a large wheel window with sexfoil tracery and fishscale patterning to the tympanum. The south aisle has 19th-century Perpendicular style pointed arched windows: two 2-lights and a doorway on the south side, and a large 4-light window at the east end. The north transept, with an arched gablet, terminates in the Fortescue vault, which has an embattled parapet, two narrow round-arched openings with eared architraves at the east end flanked by diagonal buttresses, and a plaque on the north side inscribed "to memory of Hugh 3rd Earl Fortescue and of 4 generations of his ancestors". The vault is flanked by Norman style round-arched windows.

The interior features semi-circular headed arches in Norman style to the tower and transepts and to a 2-bay aisle arcade with scalloped capitals. The roof throughout is ceiled wagon style with panels painted in foliated decoration. The chancel roof is particularly elaborate and was painted by Lady Susan Fortescue around 1880. The apse of the chancel is panelled in leaf patterns of multicoloured stone, continued as mosaics behind the choir stalls, with an inscription to George Damer, 7th son of the Earl Fortescue, lost in HMS Wasp in the China seas in 1887.

The 19th-century pulpit has three facets, with twin arches in a larger arch supported on cable twist colonettes to each blind panel. The marble font is dedicated to Georgina, Countess Fortescue, as are a series of six chancel stained glass windows. On the nave's north side are two windows dedicated to Alice Sophie Fortescue (died 1881) and Eleanor Hester Fortescue (died 1864). The north transept contains windows to Henry Fortescue (died 1875) and his wife (died 1869), and to Francis Fortescue (died 1897) and Katherine his wife (died 1884). The large 4-light east window of the aisle, formerly the east window of the chancel, was moved here during the 1876-7 restoration and is filled with stained glass in memory of the first Earl Fortescue. Two windows on the south side contain stained glass to the memory of the Hon. George Matthew Fortescue (died 1877), Rev. Canon John Fortescue (died 1869), and the Hon. John William Fortescue (died 1859).

Monuments in the nave on the north side include two small brass plates in square panels with kneeling figures to Richard Fortescue (died 1570). In the south aisle are wall monuments to Hugh, first Earl Fortescue (died 1841) and his wife (died 1847) by Gould of Barnstaple; to Susan, wife of Hugh, Viscount Ebrington (died 1827); and to Lucy Fortescue, widow of Hugh Fortescue (died 1767).