Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire

by W. F. Rawnsley

TREVENEN PENROSE

The two arches of the north arcade are Transition Norman; those on the south Early English, with good stiff foliage. The tall, plain porch had once a room over it, and retains its richly moulded Transition doorway. The font is of the same date, being a massive cylinder with Norman arcading cut on it, and with four equidistant pillars which give it a square appearance. The crocketed spire is a good one, Perpendicular in style, and of better stone than the tower. The three lancet windows at the east end are filled with good glass, and the seats are of oak with poppy-heads throughout. The fellows of Oriel College, Oxford, to whom the living belongs, helped in its restoration by Bodley and Garner in 1901. The wall at the west end of the south aisle, which runs up to the tower and also forms the west side of the porch, as the aisle has no window, is one long blank face, which has a singularly ugly look outside. Inside, there are some good bench-ends, and there is an inscription by Sir John Coleridge to the Rev. Trevenen Penrose, who spent the greater part of a long life as vicar of the parish.

Navenby.

The Hall is a gabled house of 1628, built by Sir W. Lester, now the property of the Tempest family, and having classic temples in the grounds, one of them adapted from the Rotunda in the baths of Diocletian at Rome.

Harmston, the next village, has a tower of the pre-Norman type, with a mid-wall shaft to the window of the belfry in which are eight bells. A brass plate commemorates Margaret Thorold who had a family of eight sons and eleven daughters, and lived to be eighty.

BRACEBRIDGE

Waddington has some very good Early English work in its clustered columns and carved capitals. Here the string of villages, one at every milestone, ceases, and we go on for three miles seeing the beautiful minster tower in front of us on the height, and arrive at Bracebridge, a very dark church, but with some most interesting Long-and-Short work in the tower, in the angles of the nave, and in the south porch, and a Norman west door to the tower, which is a very early one with mid-wall shaft to the belfry window. The Norman north door is now blocked. There is a curious rectangular opening, twice as wide as its height, in the south aisle, near the porch, which allows a view between the pillars and through the hagioscope or “squint” on the right of the chancel arch to the altar. Another squint is on the left side of the chancel arch, which is a very narrow and early one, through a thick wall.

The nave pillars, two on each side, are cylindrical with four banded shafts attached. The north aisle and transept are modern. A fine Transition Norman font is mounted on a new base, and on the pulpit is still to be seen the old hour-glass stand, as at Leasingham; though there and at Belton in the Isle of Axholme it is attached to a pillar, at Sapperton and Hammeringham it is on the pulpit. There is also an old cracked Sanctus bell.

The road over the heath unites with the Grantham road near Bracebridge, and runs into Lincoln by the Stonebow, and on up to the Minster Hill.