I go to Studland fairly irregularly. My parents like the Bankes Arms pub and I like the kayaking school and the walk up to Old Harry Rocks. The Bankes Arms is the sort of pub where the food is simple but really solid. Look at the size of this cheese ploughman’s and especially the size of the cheese:
But this isn’t about the pub and its enormous cheese portions. This is about St Nicholas’s Church, which lurks begins the South Beach car park next to the pub.
You can just about be forgiven for not noticing it. There are trees and its tower doesn’t resemble any church I’ve ever seen. It’s a Norman church, an actual surviving unreconstructed Norman church from the second half of the eleventh century. When William the Conqueror started his project of building twenty-something Norman cathedrals, I reckon there was also a project of building less spectacular Norman churches. Certainly we have a lot of them. It’s your typical picturesque little English country church, grey stone with a square grey tower at one end.
Except this one. This one has a central tower, just like a Norman cathedral, but it’s rough and the sort of square that looks more like an old castle. Back in the day, the church would have been more or less a castle, the only solid stone defendable building in a settlement. I guess it figures that it looks more functional than decorated to the glory of God. When we associate churches like this – well, not so much like this one – so strongly with the Church of England, it’s really weird to remember that this was a Catholic church when it was built – it predates Henry VIII’s falling-out with the Pope by a good few centuries. Or maybe the bit you see sticking out of the trees looks a bit like a ramshackle barn of some kind. It doesn’t look like a church.
The two ends of the church look more church-like except that outside, on the west end of the north wall, there’s a square door fifteen feet up, accessible by a ladder. This leads to a small room above the sanctuary which may have been accommodation for visiting priests but is more likely a store room. And while St Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, which makes sense in this village on the edge of the sea, he’s also the patron saint of thieves and we all know the stories of pirates, privateers and smugglers in this part of the world. It’s entirely possible – entirely likely – that this store room was used to hide booty.
Inside the church, that centre tower is semi-supported by big Norman arches exactly like the ones in the oldest parts of Winchester Cathedral. I say semi-supported because there are cracks in the stonework, so prominent that it’s noted on the little guidebook. The tower is too heavy for the inexpert building and the weak foundations on sand and graves that were a millennium old before the church was even built. They were “sensitively” strengthened and braced in the nineteenth century, so I’m reasonably confident it’s not about to collapse. That might be why the tower is so squat, even by Norman standards. Not strong enough for any more weight. There are four bells hiding up there. No splendid chamber for them; bells weren’t a thing when this church was built so the bellchamber is a very squat low room that’s virtually inaccessible because it was originally probably just a store room. The current bells date from somewhere between 1600 and 1700 and they’re tiny from ropes strung through the ceiling and secured behind the altar.
The sanctuary, at the west end, initially struck me as the newest part of the church. Its arches and its ceiling are a little pointed – not full Gothic but definitely less round than the arches in the tower. And then I looked more closely at the tower and realised its ceiling is also slightly pointed, presumably the natural result of trying to build a square room. Above the beams, the nave’s roof is also a tiny bit pointed. The arches above the windows in the sanctuary are round Norman but the windows are just as slightly-pointed as the narrow slit windows in the nave. But the end effect is that it looks a hundred years or so younger than the chancel.
The east end looks newer than the tower from the outside but older from the inside. The stonework is less rougher, less tidy and a lot less decorative. Mind you, when it was built, the preaching was done in the chancel in Latin and the arches were screened off from the congregation who gathered in the nave. Maybe it’s deliberately less pretty because of the unimportance of the people compared to the priest. I’m pretty new to the world of religious architecture.
What you can’t miss is that the windows on the south wall are those narrow slits I mentioned earlier, castle-and-archery style. These are filled with relatively recent tall thin stained glass panels. The north wall, meanwhile, had much bigger windows but they’re filled with plain glass, making it much lighter than it looks from the outside of you approach from the car park entrance. On this day it was filled with flowers, ready for a wedding and the whole effect was just sweet and lovely and perfect. I have no idea how we’ve never noticed before, although I admit my interest in churches has shot up since the Notre Dame fire. This is a good church.
I have no immediate plans to get married – or even the faintest glimmer of an idea who the other party might be – but I think I could be very tempted to get married in this church. Or Wookey Hole. Or Winchester Cathedral.