Church of St. Thomas a Becket

Church of St. Thomas a Becket

Built mainly of red sandstone with repairs and refacing in much paler buff sandstone. Originally squared coursed semi-ashlar, now much worn except where repaired. Welsh slate roofs.

The church comprises an aisleless nave with a west door in a semi-porch and west bellcote, chancel with south porch into vestry.

The nave is two storeys with a cill band for the upper windows. The west semi-porch has three orders of three-quarter columns set within a flat-topped side-buttressed stone structure. Some genuine Norman work survives here in the orders, but the original door to the church was the north one, so this west porch may be a Wyatt invention, perhaps reusing the orders from the north door where they have been replaced with definite 19th-century work. Above the porch is an arched window and above that a clock in a circular stone frame. A Prichard-Seddon type bellcote perches on the gable apex, with a single bell in an east-west opening and a pyramid slate roof with weathervane above.

The north wall has corner buttresses and a small arched window at the west end, introduced in 1832. A large central doorway with Victorian colonnettes but original arches and a Victorian door occupies the centre; 1832 pews are built against this door on the inside, suggesting it was probably closed up then. Two arched windows on the upper floor flank the doorhead, with another to the east, all aligned by a continuous cill band. The roof above is steeply pitched. The chancel has a Victorian Norman style door, a central buttress and two replaced windows. The east end has buttresses on either side and a Victorian 3-light window with plain arched lights and dripmould. The chancel has a lower roofline than the nave, allowing the nave a small arched window in the peak of the gable. Both nave and chancel gables have apex crosses.

The south wall of the chancel resembles the north but is partly covered by the vestry, which is single-storeyed in matching Norman style with an elaborate arched priest's door facing west and a decorative corbel table, the roof hidden behind a parapet. The south wall of the nave repeats the north wall but without the central doorway.

The interior presents a remarkable and complete survival of an extremely early Norman Revival scheme of decoration in a pre-ecclesiological interior. It is a Georgian preaching box plan with Norman enrichments and is probably unique from the early 1830s. This reflects both Wyatt's interest in and respect for the 12th-century Norman work and his determination to match its character.

The nave is plastered and painted with a wide-span king post roof with additional queen struts, close-boarded above. A fine late Norman style chancel arch of two orders has outer dogtooth, though the colonnettes are renewed.

Remarkable timber galleries of 1832 are cantilevered from the wall on large carved brackets, with a continuous Norman arcade as their front. Pews and pulpit of the same period, in varying levels of elaboration, survive complete. Two fonts stand in the baptistery: a plain 15th-century one and a disused one with a 19th-century interlace stem and a charming possibly recut Romanesque bowl.

The only alteration to the nave is the partitioning off of part of the west end. The chancel has stripped stone walls with largely recut rere-arches and an arch-braced collar-beam roof. The east wall is clearly a late Victorian rebuild. An arcaded Norman style altar frontal survives. The east window dates to 1957 and is by Celtic Studios.