Kilpeck

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Kilpeck (Welsh: Llanddewi Cil Peddeg) is a small Herefordshire village renowned for its Norman (Romanesque) church but also having the earthworks for a castle, no longer standing.

Kilpeck is about 14 km southwest of Hereford, just south of the A465, the road to Abergavenny.

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Kilpeck church

Image:Kilpeck01.jpg The parish church of St Mary and St David was built around 1140 (and almost certainly by 1143), perhaps as a replacement for an earlier Saxon church at the same site. The plan of the church, with a nave, chancel, and semicircular apse, is normal for the time.

What is remarkable is the carving of the red sandstone, particularly of the south door, the west window, and a row of corbels which run right around the exterior of the church under the eaves. The carvings are all from the time the church was built, and are in their original positions.

The south door has double columns. The outer columns have carvings of a series of snakes, heads swallowing tails. In common with most of the other carvings, the meaning of these is unclear, but they may represent rebirth via the snake's seasonal sloughing of its skin. The inner right column shows birds in foliage; at the top of the right columns is a green man. The inner left column has two warriors who, unusually, are in loose trousers. The outer sections of the arch above the doorway show creatures which can be interpreted as a manticore and a basilisk, and various other mythical and actual birds and beasts. The semicircular tympanum depicts a tree of life.

Image:Kilpeck04.jpg

An angel appears in the centre of the arch above the south door

Other details of the arch include serpents and dragons swallowing their tails

The "green man" on the capital of the columns to the east side of the south door

For many years the south door was hidden by a wooden porch, but this was removed in 1868 in order to allow visitors to see the carvings as originally intended. Although this has left the carvings open to the elements, the sandstone is considered to be rather robust, and its condition is carefully monitored. In 1968 a narrow protruding strip of lead was let into the mortar above the arch to protect the carvings from water running down the wall above.

Eighty-five corbels survive, one fewer than are illustrated by Lewis in 1842 (originally there were 91). The meaning of most is obscure, but some probably come from a bestiary, and they include a sheela na gig.

One corbel shows a hound and hare

Two corbels, depicting a ram and a lion

The famous sheela na gig

Two green men appear as capitals on the richly decorated columns of the west window. In the centre of the corbel table below the window, and at each corner of the nave's west wall, are large protruding dragons' heads with coiled tongues. Each of the three mouths gapes to a different degree, rather like an animated sequence evenly spaced across the western facade. (A fourth dragon head, on the south-east corner of the nave, is broken.)

Inside the church, the chancel arch is also richly carved, though far less spectacular than the south doorway. The ceiling boss or keystone of the apse depicts four lions' heads. There is a massive baptismal font of polished conglomerate, a curious holy water stoup, shaped like a fat, tightly girdled torso (brought from a chapel near Wormbridge), and a rare Romanesque font-stopper.

A very simple belfry now rises from the roof; although its design is in keeping with that of the rest of the church, it is a 19th-century addition. Elsewhere too, the restoration and necessary modernization of the church have conserved it well.

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Sources

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