English Church Architecture - Suffolk.
HINDERCLAY, St. Mary (TM 027 768) (August 2006) (Bedrock: Upper Cretaceous, Upper Chalk)
This rather modest building consists of a chancel, a nave with a S. aisle, a
W. tower, and a simple wooden S. porch of cruck construction. Windows
are not of much interest, being Decorated and reticulated in the chancel
except for one with cusped Y-tracery to the north, and mostly square-headed
and Perpendicular in the aisle and N. wall of the nave. The blocked N.
doorway appears Norman in origin but the S. doorway inside the porch is
rather later and probably contemporary with the aisle arcade. The
Perpendicular tower
(shown left, from the west)
is diagonally-buttressed and rises in two stages to stepped battlements
decorated with flint flushwork. The rather rather unusual
square-headed bell-openings are formed of flint chequerwork panels below and
supermullioned tracery above, in which the heads of the reticulation units
intersect. However, probably the most noteable feature of the church
is the four-bay Early English arcade
(illustrated below right),
formed of short circular piers supporting deeply hollow-chamfered arches of
two orders. Pevsner considered this “early thirteenth century”
and it is certainly rather crude. Yet it could be somewhat later, or early
thirteenth
century work remodelled, for although the piers and capitals fit
Pevsner’s date, hollow chamfered mouldings do not appear to have been common
in East Anglia in this period. The tower arch has three orders bearing
two flat and one recessed flat chamfers. The chancel arch was badly damaged
when it was cut away to house a former rood loft, but is formed of a
deeply hollow chamfered inner order springing from semi-octagonal shafts,
and a narrow outer order without capitals. The best feature of the chancel
itself is the corner piscina in the E. splay of the easternmost S. window,
with its circular shaft at the
Finally, the church was not mentioned by Gunnis but a monument on the N. side of the chancel commemorating a certain George Thompson (d. 1711), features an achievement above, putti at the sides, and the winged faces of cherubs beneath. The only items of woodwork worth particularizing are some plain benches in the nave, with simple poppyheads.
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