Worth the journey just to see this one thing

There is something well worth travelling to Langford in west Oxfordshire to see. If you rely on the bus it is no easy journey unless you stay overnight, in which case you could take in Kelmscott, a limestone village by the Thames best known for the lovely 17th-century manor house once leased by William Morris, who wrote of its roof of graduated stone tiles: “It gives me the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fish’s scales or a bird’s feather.”

At St Matthew’s church, Langford, I was distracted from the thing worth travelling to see by a rustic wall-plaque memorial surmounted by a carved head dressed in a periwig. The memorial is dated 1691 and of particular interest to me, though touchingly of appeal to any human being.

It was normal in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Devon at the time, as John Aubrey shows, to spell house as “howse”. The memorial says: Within this Little Howse

Three Howses Lye: John Howse, James Howse,

the short-lived twinns & I, Anne, of John Howse once the

Endeared wife, Who lost mine owne to give

those Babes their Life. We three though Dead yet

Speak and put in Mind The Husband Father whome

wee left behind That we were Howses only

made of Clay And Called-for Could no

Longer with Him stay, But were Layd Here, to take

our Rest and Ease, By death who taketh whome

and where he please. St Matthew’s is Anglosaxon. Even if it was built shortly after 1066, it was in the Anglo-saxon style, of which the big, square tower gives evidence. That tower separates the nave from the chancel. The later chancel is airy, with pointed windows in a sort of ogee (or squashed lozenge) shape.

But to see the altar from the nave, the people have to look through a narrow arch which penetrates the thickness of the tower with a vaulted tunnel. If it is Anglo-saxon, we are told, it is one of only three such vaults surviving, the other two being at Hexham and Monkwearmouth. The effect is pleasing if not intentional.

Nor is the impression made by the thing worth travelling to see. This is a sculpture of Christ on the Cross between the figures of the Virgin Mary and St John (below left).

It is let into the outside wall above the south porch door. The flanking figures have been reassembled at some time the wrong way round, so that they appear to face away from the central figure of Christ, instead of contemplating him. But Christ on the Cross is far more arresting, seeming to stoop to fit into the space below the oppressive overhanging masonry.

This too is a result of each arm having been reassembled upside down, and swapped left to right. It would be a striking sculpture anyway from this period. As it is, it looks like some Modern masterpiece.

An even older crucifix in stone is sheltered nearby, and, going by its long, sleeved robe, it is perhaps from the eighth century. But it is now, sadly, headless.

I was inspired to travel to Langford by Alan Brooks’s wonderful new volume Oxfordshire: North and West, updating Pevsner’s work in the Buildings of England series (or in this case the work of Jennifer Sherwood, who edited the first edition in 1974).

England is blessed in having a Pevsner architectural guide to each county. A long-term project of scholarship of the sort in which this country shines, it is all the better for the help of Yale as publishers. Oxfordshire is a varied county with highly rewarding churches to visit (not to mention a palace like Blenheim). Langford is a stunning place to start.