St Peter's Church, Winchcombe

St Peter's is the parish church of Winchcombe, on Gloucester Street in the middle of the town. It was built in a single short campaign between about 1458 and 1468, and it is listed Grade I. Most visitors come for the 40 or so carved heads that run round its parapets.

History

St Peter's was built in the 1450s and 1460s to replace the town's decayed parish church beside the abbey. Christian worship in Winchcombe goes back to Saxon times, and the earliest record of a church dedicated to St Peter dates from 1175, when it was closely tied to the Benedictine abbey that stood immediately to the east.

Abbot William and Lord Sudeley

For a time in the fifteenth century the townspeople worshipped in the nave of the abbey church, which suggests their old church had become unfit. The new building was paid for first by Abbot William of Winchcombe and then by Ralph Boteler, Lord Sudeley, who was rebuilding Sudeley Castle in the same years. Because it went up in one brief period, the listing calls it a regular church, all of one brief period, and from outside it still looks much as it did when it was finished.

After the abbey

The abbey was dissolved under Henry VIII and has been completely destroyed; nothing of it stands above ground today, so St Peter's is the town's great medieval survivor. The chancel had a steep roof put on in 1690. In 1870 the church was restored and refitted, and most of the pews date from then; in 1872 John Drayton Wyatt, who had worked with George Gilbert Scott on the almshouses of Dent's Terrace in 1865 and later built Vineyard Bridge, rebuilt the upper parts of the chancel. The gilded weathercock on the tower was bought from St Mary Redcliffe in Bristol in 1874, the church says.

What to see

St Peter's is a church to walk round outside before you go in. The grotesques run along the parapets of the tower, the nave and the aisles: about 40 heads, roughly half of them demons and beasts and the rest caricatures of local people. They are not true gargoyles, since most carry no water spout, and one of them, beside the south porch, is said to be Ralph Boteler himself.

• The tower: four stages with diagonal buttresses, large gargoyles and, inside, a fan vault under the tower arch.
• The south porch: two storeys, with a figure of St Peter in a niche, a fan-vaulted ceiling and a fine pair of eighteenth-century inner doors.
• The stone coffins: two of them stand at the west end of the aisles, associated with the legends of St Kenelm, the boy king whose shrine made the abbey a place of pilgrimage.
• The nave: six bays of octagonal pillars under a flat timber ceiling on cambered beams, and a large painted Royal Arms of George III's reign in the tower arch.
• The chancel: sedilia with nodding ogee heads, possibly older than the rest of the church, and angel corbels under the roof.
• The glass: medieval fragments in a south aisle window and the Lady Chapel, among good twentieth-century glass.
• The altar cloth: an embroidered cloth from the time of Henry VIII, kept behind a curtain to protect it from the light.
• The brasses: seventeenth and eighteenth-century brasses to townspeople in both aisles, and a fine alms chest on a pillar in the north aisle.

Visiting

St Peter's is open every day from 9.30am, closing at 4pm in winter and 5pm in summer, and entry is free. Services are held on Sundays and some weekdays, when visitors are asked to wait. The National Churches Trust entry, supplied by the church, gives level access to the main areas and says the church is dog friendly; A Church Near You lists a ramp, an accessible toilet, a hearing loop, baby changing and guidebooks. Come on a bright morning to see the grotesques on the south side in good light.

Getting there

St Peter's is on Gloucester Street (GL54 5LU), a few minutes' walk from the town centre. By car, free on-street parking is usually available on Gloucester Street and Abbey Terrace, and Back Lane car park behind the library is the nearest public car park. The 606 bus from Cheltenham stops in the town, run by Pulhams, roughly hourly in the day from Monday to Saturday, with no Sunday service.

On foot, the Cotswold Way's section from Winchcombe to Cleeve Hill starts a few steps away on Abbey Terrace, part of the Cotswold Way. The loop by Belas Knap and Cleeve Common passes the church on the way out of town, and the Winchcombe and Belas Knap walk starts at Back Lane, just behind it.

Nearby

The rest of Winchcombe is close by: the almshouses of Dent's Terrace on Abbey Terrace, Vineyard Bridge over the River Isbourne, and the gates of Sudeley Castle. Out of town, Hailes Church has medieval wall paintings, and St James' Chapel at Postlip is a Norman chapel on the Cotswold Way. For food, the White Hart and the Lion Inn are both a short walk away on the main street. St Peter's is one of the churches in our story on the Cotswold wool churches.