Church of Saint Mary. Benhall, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom, Europe.
Benhall is in central E Suffolk, 1½ miles SW of Saxmundham in rolling arable land on the E side of the Alde valley. St Mary's is a flint and septaria church with a nave with a S porch and a large transeptal N chapel, a chancel with a separately roofed N chapel that communicates with the transept, and a W tower. The nave has a chevron-decorated 12thc. S doorway under a 15thc. porch of flint and knapped flint. The nave windows are 15thc. and there is a wooden W gallery that partly conceals the tall, pointed tower arch. The transept and N chapel were built in the 19thc. to house a vestry and schoolroom. The organ now occupies the N transept, and the entrance arch from the chancel to the N chapel has been blocked. The chapel, and the space in the transept behind the organ are now given over to vestry uses, and are accessed through a doorway at the E end of the N chancel wall. The chancel windows are in a , as are the N windows of the 19thc. transept and chapel. On the S side of the chancel, the priest's doorway is protected by a little gabled porch, also 19thc. The nave, chancel, transept and chapel all have diagonal buttresses with flushwork panels. The two-storey W tower is unbuttressed and has long and short quoins at the SE, NW and NE angles and a shallow buttress-like projection on the S wall marking the bell stair. This also has long and short quoins, and the lower part of the tower thus probably dates from the later 11thc., although Mortlock suspected that it was substantially a 19thc. rebuild. At the SW angle the long quoins have been replaced in brick, and there is a later inserted W doorway. The upper storey has 15thc. bell-openings, and the inserted W window is also Perpendicular. The battlemented parapet has flushwork decoration. The only Romanesque sculpture is on the elaborate S doorway.
Size: 4850px × 3651px
Location: Church of Saint Mary. Benhall, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom, Europe.
Photo credit: © Stan Pritchard / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: benhall, church, mary, saint, suffolk
