Stragglethorpe

Location

This little and low church crouches in one corner of a farmyard, amid farm buildings redeveloped as holiday lets. As you approach the church from the south everything your eye takes in is thirteenth or fourteenth century, but the west end has a blocked late Saxon door and internally there are other earlier features.



You enter via the Early English south doorway with its billety hoodmould and as you push the weathered medieval door ajar, you are confronted with a remarkable interior, a church the Victorians forgot. The church is full of box pews, there is a double decker pulpit and there all the additions you would expect from a reformed interior. A flat painted ceiling, Georgian altar table, painted boards with the Decalogue and other texts and the royal arms of George the First.



Peeping out from amid the sea of oak and deal, is a touching monument. It is white marble tablet by Thomas Green of Camblewell and is of superb quality. It was erected in memory of Sir Richard Earle, 2nd Baronet of Stragglethorpe, who died in 1697 aged twenty four. The monument was put here by his grieving mother and incorporates a tender inscription recording her love and her loss and busts of her only son and his father in periwigs. On the floor of the chancel is a ledger stone commemorating his grandfather the first Baronet, who died in 1667. Of the medieval furnishings of this church little survives, except for the squat Norman arcaded font and a panel of medieval glass fragments. The glass, which provides a wonderful splash of colour in the east windiw is a rare survival, for it is the earliest remaining in a Lincolnshire church, dating from first half of the thirteenth century. This is a church with great historical and visual appeal and is not to be missed!



Access: The church is approached along the farmyard from the centre of the village. The church is locked, but there is a keyholder notice in the porch.

If you wish to see more photos of Stragglethorpe, have a look at my Flickr set.