Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Richard Surman

      5m/8km W. of Newmarket

      OS TL568638 GPS 52.2509N, 0.2959E

      Churches Conservation Trust

      Two churches in one churchyard stand on a little hillock above the village street. Both are large with good towers. St Cyriac has a distinctive late 15th-century octagonal upper stage with flushwork parapet.

      SWAFFHAM PRIOR † St Mary

      5m/8km W. of Newmarket

      OS TL568639 GPS 52.2512N, 0.2956E

      St Mary, next to St Cyriac (see previous entry) is 12th-century, partly octagonal and formerly crowned by a stone spire. Entrance is through the W. tower, with views up through the stages.

      THORNEY ABBEY † St Mary and St Botolph

      7m/11km N.E. of Peterborough

       OS TF282042 GPS 52.6205N, 0.1071W

      Its atmosphere is ascribable in part to fine trees growing in and around the little town. The church is a fragment (five bays of the nave) of the Romanesque abbey, taken over as a parish church in 1638. The E. end was added by Blore in Norman style in 1840–1, and includes an effective window copied from glass in Canterbury Cathedral.

      WESTLEY WATERLESS † St Mary the Less

      5m/8km S. of Newmarket

      OS TL617562 GPS 52.1805N, 0.3650E

      It stands high on the chalk, and has some of the deepest wells in the county. The neat little church has lost its small round tower, and the west gable wall that replaced it was rebuilt in the mid-19th century. It is in an original if somewhat finicky Decorated idiom. There is a good early 14th-century brass to Sir John and Lady de Creke.

      WHITTLESEY † St Mary

      5m/8km E. of Peterborough

      OS TL269969 GPS 52.5557N, 0.1282W

      The church has the best tower and spire in the county; it can be seen for miles around, though it is rather dwarfed by the forest of chimneys to the left as you approach by road from the S. There is a selection of stained glass and a monument to General Sir Harry Smith, d. 1860, by G. C. Adams of London, in the Westminster Abbey tradition. Another monument in the chancel, to Elizabeth Kentish, d. 1792, was designed in Rome by her sorrowing husband, Richard Kentish.

      WIMPOLE † St Andrew

      6m/10km N. of Royston

      OS TL336509 GPS 52.1411N, 0.0484W

      A church in the squire’s back yard, 14th-century in origin but almost entirely rebuilt by Henry Flitcroft in 1749. It was restored in the Decorated style in 1887. Fine 14th-century heraldic glass is in the N. chapel, and there is a remarkable series of monuments by Scheemakers, Banks, Bacon, Flaxman, Westmacott and others.

      WISBECH † St Peter and St Paul

      12m/19km S.W. of King’s Lynn

      OS TF462095 GPS 52.6640N, 0.1618E

      With handsome 18th-century and later houses on the ‘brinks’ fronting the River Nene, Wisbech cuts a dash under favourable conditions. The large town church has three nave arcades and is rather dark within. There is a bit of everything from the 12th century onwards, but the early 16th century provided the free-standing N. bell-tower and the ornate S.E. vestry, perhaps originally a guild chapel. Numerous wall-plaques include one by Joseph Nollekens. The reredos depicting the Last Supper is by Salviati, 1885, to a design by Basset-Smith.

      WITTERING: ALL SAINTS – sculpted head in the north aisle arcade

      WITTERING † All Saints

      3m/4km S.E. of Stamford

      OS TF056020 GPS 52.6057N, 0.4416W

      This lovely two-celled late Saxon church has a tremendous chancel arch and original nave and chancel quoins. The good Norman nave arcade has roll mouldings and zigzags. There is a late 13th-/early 14th-century W. tower.

      YAXLEY † St Peter

      4m/6km S. of Peterborough

       OS TL177918 GPS 52.5118N, 0.2671W

      There is some agreeable colour in the village, with black-and-white timber cottages thrown against brick and tile. The church, noble and large for the size of the community, has an elegant steeple with flying buttresses crowning an impressive composition. The many components – aisles, transepts and porch – mass together most fittingly. The plan is complex, with an aisled chancel and transepts, all of differing roof levels. Inside, there is a series of fragmented medieval narrative wall-paintings and a good 15th-century East Anglian chancel screen. The E. window, altar and reredos are by Sir Ninian Comper. Outside is a good scattering of carved figures, grotesques and gargoyles.

      ASTBURY: ST MARY – the corbel heads lining the nave arcades are thought to represent some of the church’s medieval benefactors

CHESHIRE

      Cheshire is crossed by many whose eyes are on a target beyond. It is on the way to Wales, on the route north and south, and for such travellers Cheshire does little to arrest the unseeing eye. It is flat except at the edges, and the roads are so good and the corners so hideously made safe that the visitor is almost hustled through it. To those, however, who treat Cheshire as an end rather than as a means, the county is surprisingly rewarding.

      Elsewhere the county has an almost regular pattern. The background is always richly pastoral, and, from north to south down the centre, chemical works have followed the line of the three salt towns, Northwich, Middlewich and Nantwich. The smaller elements in the pattern are more ancient, and stem from Welsh as well as English settlement: there are few villages, and many scattered farms and hamlets.

      The typical medieval parish church, especially in the south and west of the county, served a vast area, often as much as 30 square miles in extent. Malpas, Great Budworth, Bunbury, Acton and Astbury are churches of this kind. It is not surprising, therefore, that there should be so many interesting private chapels and former chapels of ease, nor that some of the ancient parochial churches of the county should be of such splendour.

      It is not only, however, for size or interest that some Cheshire churches are remarkable. A great many of them are cleverly sited, using slight eminences to dominate their surroundings, and most of them are built of red sandstone, a stone never much used for houses. The typical 15th-century Cheshire church must have looked fine when its mouldings were sharp and the houses beneath it half-timbered. Now the detail is frayed or replaced, the surrounding black and white is yearly giving way to a modern uniformity, and it is to the untypical church that one is attracted, to Astbury, built of millstone grit, to the brick churches of Tushingham, to the Peovers, to curious Baddiley and freakish Birtles. Here, perhaps, in these untypical Cheshire churches, the county is now typified, a county that only reveals itself to those who leave the fast through roads, and rewards them handsomely.

      ACTON † St Mary

      1m/2km W. of Nantwich

       OS SJ631530 GPS 53.0737N,