A Mysterious Medieval Woman

There is a mysterious woman, who dates from around  the 12th Century, living in this little church  set  high on a hill in the rolling countryside of the Lincolnshire Wolds.  A Benedictine Priory shared the site, although no evidence of that remains today.

As you climb up the fairly steep hill it is easy to imagine the gravestones are hurrying down...

The hillside and the churchyard is being constantly undermined by rabbits.

A poem has been written about it, I'll post it on a separate page (top tab) in case anyone would like to read it.

This is the south side of the church - a fascinating patchwork of greenstone, red bricks, old blocked archways and wonderful windows.   So many alterations, repairs, subtractions, 900 years of history.

Go in through the porch door, look right, this is what you will see...  light, bright, fairly plain.

Turn to the left and ... it suddenly looks altogether richer, possibly more interesting.

Click to enlarge.

Up in the floor of the bell tower chamber you will be able to see three elongated, wingless angels.




Beautiful though they are, these are not the mystery.

The screening is richly painted, picked out in gold.

Beyond, in the base of the tower are two beautiful old doors.  One leads outside, the other to the staircase.

Originally the main roof of the church would also have had figures on it, these have been lost somewhere through the ages.

The font was bestowed on the church in the fifteenth century, it looks in surprisingly good condition for something so old - I particularly liked the wooden lid which has a lot of iron work on the top.

The floor is a real mixture of tiles and bricks, more evidence of the many changes through the years.

This is in the floor near the font,  I felt an almost overwhelming desire to have a peek to see what was down beneath those doors...then my imagination kicked in.

I decided not to look.

The window over the altar depicts St Michael.  Beneath is the beautiful carving on the altar.

I have only visited this church once before, I can't believe how little impression it made upon me at that time.

Today I visited with the sole intention of photographing the myseterious, medieval woman shown in this fragment of a wall painting, high up on one wall, above a very beautiful Norman arch.

It is a woman, she is wearing a lovely headdress and to her right there is a crown and the letter 'M'.

No one knows for sure what the 'M' could stand for  Queen  Maud,  Queen Margaret, or 'M' for Maria?  She is cetainly beautiful.  I wonder just what this church used to look like in those long gone days.

Can you see the fragment of painting, high up above the pulpit on the left hand side?   The beautiful arch is Norman.

I'll finish here, although I have hardly begun showing all the beautiful details of the church - the dancing stags carved into the capital of one column, the Norman shields,   Jacobean carving,  monuments and memorials.  There is even a bit of medieval graffiti.

How could I ever have thought this a dull little church?   It is beautiful and I look forward to visiting it again.