Another Anglo-Saxon Church - Barnack

Barnack is in the farthest north west corner of Cambridgeshire, just off the A1 north of Peterborough. Last Sunday the Cambridgeshire Historic Churches Trust had this month's visit to the church there and to two other nearby churches.

Barnack Rag, a kind of limestone, was extensively used locally for large and important buildings in the middle ages. Ely and Peterborough cathedrals are both largely built with it. In the village there is a little nature reserve called Hills and Holes which is all that is left of the quarries which provided the livelihood of the villagers for several hundred years. It is as bumpy as the much earlier Grimes Graves in Suffolk, a field of indentations which are the remains of Stone Age flint quarrying.

The village and the church are built in the local stone, which makes for a very picturesque settlement. The tower is one of the best Saxon ones in the country. It dates from around 1000AD. In the pictures the two sections which are that old are the bottom level and that above containing the clock. Above that there are a belfry and spire dating from around 1200. The rest of the church is from around 1200 to 1300 with a few occasional additions.

Inside there's a chapel with a sculpture of the Annunciation from the early 1500s. Quite surprising it survived the Reformation. The angel Gabriel does not appear. Instead rays shine from the three figures of the Trinity into the breast of the Virgin. It reminds me of the Bernini statue of St Teresa of Avila in St Peter's, Rome.

Unfortunately the niche on the right of the window in that chapel has lost its original sculpture and now houses a ghastly modern (1930s) Virgin and Child. To add to the insult the perpetrators hacked out part of the original canopy to fit the monstrosity.

Around the time the Virgin and Child was added excavation of the north aisle floor revealed a relief carving of Christ giving a blessing. It is a metre tall and quite striking and has been fixed to the wall of the aisle it was found in. In style it appears to about the same date as the tower.


The font is also from the 12oos, on an unusual base.



The churchyard has a lot of broken stone coffins lying around. As well as producing building stone the locals produced, as early as Roman times, such coffins and these were presumably unused or seconds. We know that when Queen Etheldreda, Abbess of Ely, died she was buried in one of these Roman coffins found in Cambridge and taken to be re-used. However, the oddest sight in the churchyard is the grave of a Sandhurst officer cadet whose place of rest is covered by the carved form of a fallen palm tree.