More glass than walls of honey-coloured stone
Crewkerne has preserved much of its Georgian charm (expressed in honeycoloured Ham stone), thanks to a decline in its prosperity.
Demand waned for its webbing and sailcloth, made from locally grown flax, though a picturesquely decrepit mill from the 18th century, on the way from the station, shows that it once meant business. Eventually even the pyjama factory closed.
In consequence, no money was left for rebuilding, apart from the town hall, which was turned into hulking confusion in 1900. Even that building has a lovely stone doorway, and by it a loyal plaque marking the Queen’s visit in 2012.
Round about it in the Market Square stand fine old buildings: the George Hotel, a coaching inn, where the soft stone seems almost to melt in parts, and what is now Lloyds Bank, Georgian in appearance though built well after George IV’S death.
There’s a boast that the cellars beneath Oscar’s wine bar nearby has cellars from the 12th century, upon which doubts are thrown by the recently revised Pevsner volume for south Somerset in the invaluable Buildings of England series. Oscar’s is also thought to have been a church house in the sense that it was where parishioners in the Middle Ages enjoyed their cakes and ale and raised funds for the parish and to honour their patron saints.
St Bartholomew is the dedication of the church, and what a church it is, in that lovely stone – all turrets and finials and carved grotesques, with the tower and walls battlemented. It’s a goodly size: 167ft long, and 146ft across the transepts. The west front is its jewel, with a pair of octagonal turrets running up on either side, as at Battle Abbey before it and Bath Abbey after. The door is below an ogee gable carved with élan.
As you walk past the 17th-century old grammar school uphill to the church, you can see that it is more glass than wall. Indeed, from the grass on one side of the chapel extending to the north, as a transept projecting from the central tower, you can see right through its framing tracery and out of the window on the far side into the Somerset sky.
The church wasn’t open. I hadn’t expected it to be. A notice on the door said they’d run into trouble with mould while it was closed during lockdown.
I’d gone to Crewkerne to see this church in its setting because an architect, Peter Wingrave-newell, who lives nearby, had sent me a copy of the guide to the church and its people that he has written. It looks very good, with excellent colour printing and photography, and puts things judiciously into perspective.
Crewkerne is lopsided, its centre being the crossroad at the Market Square. But on the far side of the churchyard, the land falls away before climbing again to a higher hill, and all the outlook is open country. Just there, stands a house that reflects taste in 1846, when it was built. It is called the Abbey, though no abbey was ever there. Its builder, John Hussey, from a leading local family, incorporated above his staircase a 15th-century stone traceried window from the old clergy house he demolished to make way for his Victorian Gothic house.
In 1887, his brother Thomas refused, as lay rector (an anomalous position fossilised in property law since the Reformation), to allow restoration of the church’s chancel, for which he was responsible. The gifted architect J D Sedding oversaw the rest, and it got off fairly lightly. The danger then was of rebuilding churches utterly. The danger now is lack of funds to keep the rain out.