Photopost: St Peter's Church, Cambridge

[highlyeccentric]

First, a lovely photo of Cambridge from Castle Mound:





Not too far from Castle Mound, we found

With its cute, wonkily subsided 13th century doorway (theory is there used to be a stream under here somewhere, probably explains the subsidence):





And an odd feature, shingling on the arch:





There are also vertical beakheads:





Fierce, no? Almost as fierce as our friend here, who overlooks the churchyard:





In which churchyard there is a this:



A font? But it's sorta square. I think the prevailing opinion is the generic 'ritual purposes', possibly predating the church, but that might be stretching it a bit.

Inside is tiny and white and in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust:



And there is a font with merpeople on it:



Apparently merpersons are rare - and of course possibly of pagan significance (and possibly not, but no one likes to put that on their tourist brochures; the CCT point out that St Peter was a fisherman, though).



Seems like water was a feature of the area, at any rate.

Now, the font is 12th century; the south door is 13th; and the fower which I didn't photograph, is 14th at least in part. The church was substantially rebuilt in the 18th century, though, or so wikipedia tells me. The changes in stonework lead me to think most of the roof and bits of the upper walls were the focus of the rebuilding:



(And I would be right: J.P.C. Roach tells me so, and also that the 'scale' of the church was reduced in the rebuilding.)

I was intruiged by this blocked-up archway - especially by the fact that a smaller inner arch seems to have been built in the process of blocking. Interesting! Roach isn't much use here, but druidic.org would like me to believe that this arch dates back to the original foundation. That wouldn't be the square stone arch, it'd be the rough stone arch you can just make out around it. I'd like to think the original archway had to be reinforced at some point with the big square stones, and then filled in later on.

Comments

[monksandbones]

Ooh, very cool! I wonder what my fellow medievalist grad student C, who works on baptism, would make of the mermaids font? Or for that matter, my former fellow medievalist grad student A (now with a sweet job in Minnesota)? I think they'd both, not to mention fellow grad student J who works on archaeology, be available to thwack the author of the brochure with the scholarly codfish of Christian-Pagan-dichotomies-are-bad-and-wrong-conversion-didn't-work-like-that!