United States or Mozambique ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


Peeping over them on the R. are the Quantocks, and to the L. lie the Wiltshire Downs. At the foot is a wooded vale dotted with villages. Dunkerton, a small colliery village 2-1/2 m. The church has been rebuilt. The chancel contains a Dec. piscina, and a fragment of diaper-work is inserted in the porch. Dunster, a village 24 m. N.W. from Taunton.

On the wall as we enter we may notice some diaper-work ornamentation, interesting from the fact that a similar decoration may be traced on the wall of the chapter house at Rochester for Ernulf who built the westward crypt, was afterwards made Bishop of Rochester.

Fortunately the splendid Norman nave was not badly damaged, and after a new roof had been built, it was easily made ready for holding services. The two bays nearest to the transept are early Norman, and on the south side the massive circular column is covered with a plain grooved diaper-work, almost exactly the same as may be seen at Durham Cathedral.

The walls are well built, three feet in thickness, and constructed of uncut flints; the east end is enriched with diaper-work in chequers of stone and knapped flint. Some new buildings have been added on the south side within the last century. There is a clock turret at the east end, erected in 1850 at the cost of the then Mayor.

The square heads of the door-valves, and a flat moulding above them which runs up also into the first division of the tympanum, is covered with faintly cut diaper-work of four-leaved flowers.

Above this group the spire is divided into three sections by two bands of diaper-work cut out of the stone surfaces as cusped quatrefoils; and from the base of the spire to its capstone there is a projecting rib on each angle between the several faces of the octagon.

The work in the choir included new stalls and seats, pulpit, and throne; an altar screen of clunch, filling up the lower part of the apse; and an organ screen, also of clunch, with an open parapet, and enriched with much diaper-work and many canopies, and adorned on the west face with large shields of arms, very brightly coloured, charged with the heraldic bearings of the principal subscribers.

It was the gift of Mr. John Dunn Gardner, of Chatteris, and was designed by Scott. It forms the central portion of a screen of stone which extends for the whole width of the presbytery. The lower part of the whole is of deeply cut diaper-work; the upper part has an open arcade of six arches, each with a mullion and tracery in the early Decorated style.

The so-called 'Seals of the Kings' were dark stones, probably used for painting the skin; they bore parallelograms enclosed within one another, diaper-work and gridirons of raised lines. In fact, the Guanches of Tenerife were unalphabetic.

This shrine of St. Dunstan stood on the south of the high altar, and was erected after the manner of a tomb: though the shrine itself perished at the time of the Reformation, there still remains, on the south wall of the choir, between the monuments of Archbishops Stratford and Sudbury, some very fine open diaper-work, in what is known as the Decorated style, which once formed part of the ornamentation of St.