St Mary, Sutterton

   Ss Peter & Paul was not the only church open in the neighbourhood. Nor the only church to have undergone a thorough-going Nineteenth century restoration, only handled by two lesser masters of the Gothic Revival - Edward Browning and James Fowler of Louth - the results, it has to be said, are less interesting.

   St Mary's stands close to the village street - before the building of by-pass this was the thunderous A17 between Newark and King's Lynn, and it must have been hell for residents.  Anyway St Mary's is a large big-boned sort of a church, perhaps a more work-a-day piece of architecture than Algarkirk, but still attractive with a short central tower and splendid crocketed spire.  The nave is the oldest portion - late Norman, though all the windows are later including the very complex Decorated west window.  Pevsner thought it wasn't beautiful, but you don't have to agree with him. The transepts and chancel are Early English, though much rebuilt.  The North transept is my favourite part of the church, spacious and very elegant.  And being cruciform the church has some delicious cross-vistas. The south transept and the chancel were rebuilt by Browning in 1861-3 and the chancel restored in 1879 by James Fowler and it is to him, I think, that we owe the mad tiles around the High Altar (looking very 'Sixties' in my photo).

St Guthlac, Market Deeping

   Yesterday, the Feast of the Epiphany, I braved the cold and the damp to visit the small market town of Market Deeping and the parish church of St Guthlac.  It was my first look inside.  It is a small, low slung building; the nave (Early English arcades and Perp clerestory) darkened with late Victorian and early 20th century stained & painted glass.  The chancel in contrast is light filled, where the best glass is to be found in two of the south windows. The walls of both nave and chancel have been scraped down to the bare stone, probably when the church underwent restoration in 1872 under the stern hand of James Fowler of Louth who we have encountered before at Gunby. The Wake chapel on the north of the chancel is now the organ loft.  Perhaps then, a bit of a disappointment. Exterior is however graced by a strong Late Medieval west tower, which with its crisp ashlar stands in immaculate contrast to the humble rubble built walls of the rest of the church.  I suspect that the tower was built under the patronage of that remarkable woman Lady Margaret Beaufort, Lady of the Deepings, mother of Henry VII, grandmother of Henry VIII and descendant of the Wakes. There is, on the s face, a Tudor portcullis.
   The porch contains a really quite beautiful set of nineteenth cast iron gates by Colemans, the local iron founders, and the churchyard gates too are quite fine, though not quite so nice.

Gunby Hall II: The Church of St Peter

     Beyond the Victorian shrubbery at the far end of the garden at Gunby Hall sits the parish church of St Peter - alone, it feels, among the great fields of pasture.  The village is nowhere to be seen.  In fact I don't think there's a village at all, just a few houses sitting uncomfortably along the very busy A158.
     St Peter's is a relatively small, aisleless Victorian church built 1868-70 by James Fowler of Louth, replacing an earlier Georgian structure.  A comfortable estate church, it has a porch to the south and vestry etc to the north.  James Fowler, 1828-92, was a prolific provincial architect, the restorer of many churches in the north of the county and builder also of churches at Binbrook, Hatton and Spridlington.  Perhaps his greatest work is the enormous church of St Swithun in Lincoln, built between 1869 and 1887 for the Lincoln industrialist Alfred Shuttleworth.

     Just as at St Swithun's the masonry at Gunby is hammer dressed.  The tower is perhaps the best feature: a good composition and a re-interpretation in the Early English style of a Lincolnshire Decorated Gothic tower - the kind of thing you will find at Silk Willoughby south of Sleaford.  The interior is maybe a little earth-bound but is well preserved Mid-Victorian - mildly Tractarian, with encaustic tiles etc. 

    Importantly, it is very well cared for, the interior not spoilt with a jostle of notice boards etc.  The care even extended to little springs of lavender on each pew (visible in the bottom image).