St Swithin's Church, Quenington

St Swithin's is the parish church of Quenington, a village on the River Coln in the Coln valley between Bibury and Fairford. It was recorded by 1100, and its two Norman doorways, each with a carved tympanum, make it one of the most rewarding small churches in the Cotswolds. It is listed Grade I and stands beside the gateway of the Knights Hospitallers' preceptory.

History

St Swithin's is a Norman church whose walls and doorways date mostly from the twelfth century, much restored in 1882. A church at Quenington is first mentioned in 1100, when the bishop of Worcester awarded Gloucester Abbey a yearly pension from it; the abbey said it had the church from Hugh de Lacy.

The church of the Hospitallers

In the middle of the twelfth century Agnes de Lacy and her daughter Sibyl gave the manor to the Knights Hospitallers, the crusading order of St John. The Hospitallers secured the church too, paying the abbey its pension, and about 1193 founded a preceptory just south-west of it to manage their estates. Edward I stayed there often between 1276 and 1290. The order kept Quenington until the Dissolution; its fourteenth-century gatehouse still stands at the end of Church Road. The story of both orders in the Cotswolds is told in Templars and Hospitallers in the Cotswolds.

The building

The lower walls of the nave and chancel, with their string course and flat buttresses, are later twelfth-century work, and so are the two doorways, each of three richly decorated orders, as the Victoria County History describes them. The listing dates the chancel windows to the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, though the three-light east window was copied in 1882 from the old west window; the square-headed nave windows are probably seventeenth-century. The church was called St Mary's in the twelfth century and was dedicated to St Swithin by 1735.

Towers lost and the restoration of 1882

A central tower and spire were said to have been taken down by the early 1700s, though nothing in the fabric proves it. A west tower, missing from a view of 1790, was built shortly before 1825 and pulled down in the extensive restoration of 1882, which gave the church its bellcote and spirelet, a west window, an open timber north porch, a canopy over the south door, a rebuilt chancel and a vestry.

What to see

The two tympana are the reason to come, and both are inside porches, so they can be seen even when the church is shut.

The north door: the Harrowing of Hell

The north doorway has three orders of chevron, each cut to a different pattern, on carved capitals. Its tympanum shows the Harrowing of Hell, Christ's descent among the dead after the Crucifixion to free the souls held there. The listing suggests the tympanum may be a little later than the doorway that frames it.

The south door: a coronation

The south doorway is all of one build, its orders carved with guilloche, pellets and beakheads, the bird-like heads that bite the roll moulding. Its tympanum shows a crowning, framed by the symbols of the four Evangelists. It is usually read as the Coronation of the Virgin, and the listing says it may be the earliest representation of that subject.

Inside

• A late sixteenth-century font with a cover dated 1662.
• Marble wall monuments to the Powle and Ireton families and to rectors, reset at the west end of the nave, one of the late seventeenth century.
• A small seventeenth-century brass of a shield set in the floor near the north door.

Visiting

St Swithin's is a working parish church, one of the CHEQS parishes with Coln St Aldwyns and Hatherop. Sunday services move between the three villages, and the benefice website, chqchurches.net, lists them. We could not confirm that it is open on weekdays, but the carved doorways stand in porches and can be seen at any reasonable hour. We found no car park at the church.

Getting there

Quenington is about 3km north of Fairford as the crow flies (nearly 5km by road) and 12km east of Cirencester (about 18km by road). Park considerately on the village roads; the church is on Church Road, by the river. Stagecoach West's 76, which also serves Fairford and Cirencester, stops in the village a few times a day, Monday to Saturday; check the current timetable. On foot, a Cotswolds National Landscape river walk runs from Quenington down the Coln to Fairford, and the Coln St Aldwyns and Bibury walk starts from the next village upstream.

Nearby

The Hospitallers' gateway is a few steps away, seen from the road. The Keepers Arms is in the village, and the New Inn and the Coln Community Stores are about a mile upstream at Coln St Aldwyns, whose church is St John the Baptist. Follow the River Coln down to St Mary's, Fairford for its medieval glass, or go over the hill to the twin churches of Eastleach.