Gargoyles - St Andrew's - Barningham, Suffolk - Gargoyles and Chimeras on Waymarking.com

Gargoyles on the porch and bell tower of St Andrew's church, Barningham.

"This church consists of a chancel, a nave with an adjoining S. porch, and a W. tower.

The Decorated chancel appears the oldest part of the building: its two, two-light S. windows have large elongated reticulation units in their heads, and its three-light E. window displays curvilinear tracery formed of outer lights subarcuated above daggers and pairs of small mouchettes, and above and between these, two large mouchettes squashed in around a quatrefoil set within a cusped circle. At the other end of the church, the tower, rising in three stages to two-light reticulated bell-openings and stepped battlements, might be judged contemporary on stylistic grounds, but Pevsner recorded that a Mr. A.R. Allen had “found wills of 1439 and 1440 which leave money to the fabric of the tower, the latter specifying that it is new (‘ad fabric’ nov’ campanil’ ibid’...’)”. This conflict appears to have been resolved by W. M. Lingwood, author of the church guide (printed 1990), who was able to examine the bell-openings closely while scaffolding was in place around the tower and who discovered they were grooved for glazing, which - since bell-openings are never glazed - appears to show that they have been re-used. If so, their obvious place of origin must surely be the nave, whose present Perpendicular windows would certainly fit a mid-fifteenth century date: also two-light, these have supermullioned drop tracery with a tier of small quatrefoils at the top, beneath triangular arches. It seems more likely they were inserted into pre-existing walls, than that the nave was reconstructed in its entirety at this time, and perhaps a small piece of corroborating evidence is the slightly ogee-pointed dripstone above the blocked N. doorway, which is more in keeping with the early fourteenth century than the fifteenth. The S. porch has two-light side windows with central mullions that terminate in castellated supertransoms halfway up the drop tracery. The outer doorway carries two wave mouldings, of which the inner springs from semicircular shafts."

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Water spout is used: yes Condition: Lightly Weathered

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