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On the move (2): The King’s Board My second example* of a building on the move is a small building known as the King’s Board, which now stands in Hillfield Gardens in Gloucester. You can just see it from the road as you pass the gardens and when I’d driven past previously I’d taken it for some elaborate garden seat or gazebo built by the owners of Hillfield House, Gloucester’s grandest Victorian house and now occupied, I think, by offices – an effective and unusual garden feature, indeed, which it still is. However this little building did not begin life as a gazebo. Originally it was in the centre of the city and looked quite different, because the arches, which now make up the sides of a polygon, were once arranged in a straight line along the front of a rectangular building. This rectangular building can be seen in Kip’s engraving ( c. 1710) of Gloucester and had been in Westgate Street (one of the city’s four main streets named for points of the compass). It had been a butter mark...

February carvery (5) I’d thought that my previous post would be the last of this month’s short ‘carvery’ pieces, but then I remembered Hanwell. This is one of the churches in North Oxfordshire that have distinctive carvings from the fourteenth century. Like Adderbury , it has a range of figures, beasts, and other carved subjects, both indoors and out. Some of them are of the ‘linked arms’ type on capitals, the kind I’ve previously noticed at another North Oxfordshire church, Bloxham , and elsewhere. The heads at Hanwell are if anything even better than those at Bloxham – individual, crisply carved, and full of character. This bearded face is one of my favourites. His hair, beard, nose, and mouth are well done, I think, although the eyes are rather small and mean. The overall effect though is good, and makes one smile. Nikolaus Pevsner says in his book The Leaves of Southwell (to which, I hope, I’ll soon return) that capitals mark a structural junction between two functions (column and...

February carvery (1) Life is very busy at the moment, so for the next two weeks or so, I’m going do to some short posts. I thought a common theme, medieval church carving, might be entertaining, and would enable me to share a few more pictures from some recent discoveries and rediscoveries. To begin with, a bit of early-14th century Gothic from the chancel at Navenby. This is what 14th-century Gothic is meant to look like: lots of little arches and niches, so smothered with ornament that you can hardly see the structure – crockets, finials, pinnacles everywhere. But here, as so often, there’s also a human touch – little heads that make it all less serious, one sticking its tongue out, another with a rather grumpy expression. This visitor went away far from grumpy.

Top Dec. Seen from across neighbouring gardens, the church almost disappears behind greenery. But the east window still stands out, and I think: ‘Yes! More glorious Lincolnshire tracery.’ Lincolnshire is a county full of churches with elaborate curvaceous 14th-century window tracery. At big parish churches like the ones at Sleaford, Grantham, and Heckington, the tracery curves this way and that in a series of patterns of sometimes dizzying complexity and variety – curvilinear tracery of the most inventive kind. This is a smaller church, but the east window is as wonderful as those of its larger cousins. The tracery pattern here is dominated by two mouchettes – the shapes that look like gigantic skewed commas, their tails pointing down and outwards, their heads nodding towards each other and touching at the centre. Within each mouchette are other shapes – large multi-cusped trefoils in the heads, elongated ‘daggers’ in the tails. This is all very showy and was designed to hold stained g...