Bell Tower - St Giles - Sidbury, Devon
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SMacB
N 50° 43.138 W 003° 13.217
30U E 484449 N 5618596
Norman Bell tower of St Giles' church, Sidbury, with a ring of 8 bells.
Waymark Code: WM165CK
Location: Southern England, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 05/09/2022
Views: 1
Norman Bell tower of St Giles' church, Sidbury, with a ring of 8 bells.
SOURCE - (Visit Link)
"The church is an imposing building in the centre of the village, displaying work of various periods, and is surrounded by a churchyard. At the W end is a large and important Norman tower. It is of three stages with very shallow pilaster buttresses at the corners. The S face has a later polygonal, embattled stair turret rising to near the top of the second stage. The ground storey has a pointed W doorway and above it a three-light Perpendicular window. The second stage has pairs of small Norman windows, those on the W face containing two full-length standing bas-relief figures of a bishop and a saint discovered in 1843 and probably dating from the 12th century. The belfry stage has pairs of two-light openings, separated by a flat pilaster. The openings have belfry windows have round-arched lights with a shafts in between (the E face has a single-light opening). The embattled parapets and eight pinnacles date from 1884-5 as does the slender, recessed shingled spire.
In the tower there are large, unmoulded diagonal vaulting ribs: they rest on four early 12th-century carved corbels with two lion masks, a lion and a crouching Atlantean figure. Over the tower arch is what may be a St Christopher. In the gable over the chancel arch is a 16th-century vine-trail.
In 1843 John Hayward was responsible for rebuilding the upper part of the tower and placing a pyramid spire on it. This was removed and the top of the tower altered during the 1880s restoration by J T Micklethwaite and Somers Clark."
SOURCE - (Visit Link)