Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/172

ROWSTON of it. At Digby the village cross has been restored, but with a very indifferent top, and at the other end of the village is a curious stone lock-up, like a covered well-head, and hardly capable of holding more than one man at a time. Lingfield in Surrey has a larger one called 'Ye Village Cage'; it has two steps up inside, and is capable of holding a dozen people. The tower has three stages, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular. The south door is transition Norman, the north arcade aisle and chancel Early English, the south arcade and aisle Decorated, and the font, screen and clerestory Perpendicular. In this the six tall two-light windows are distributed in pairs. Rowston, which is dedicated to St. Clement, has a spire rising from a tall tower, so little wider than itself that it may safely be said to cover less ground than any tower in England, for it measures only five and a-half feet inside; it is blank except for a rather heavy window in the upper stage. The first thing that strikes you on entering is the extraordinary loud ticking of the clock. It has to be stopped during service, as no one can compete with it. The next thing is that the thirteen windows are all filled with painted glass and of the same type, striking in design, though not of quite first-rate excellence. One window has figures of the three Lincolnshire saints—St. Guthlac, St. Hugh, and St. Gilbert. The church is in very good order, having been recently restored, and some Saxon stones with interlaced work have been built into the outside wall of the chancel. It would have been better to have put these inside. But there is inside a very good head of a churchyard or village cross, and the base and broken shaft of one, possibly the same, is just outside the churchyard. This head is of the usual penthouse form, with a carved figure on either side; it was found quite recently built into a cowshed. In the nave the pillars are all different. The vestry was over the burial chapel of the Foster family; later it was, as was so often the case, used for a school. A beautiful bit of an old carved oak screen separates it now from the north aisle. A heavy timber floor cuts across the top of the tall tower arch, and below a very curious pillar stands against one side of the arch. An Early English priest's door, with a flat-arched lintel, is in the south wall of the chancel. It is impossible to walk round the slender tower, as a garden wall runs into it on both the north and south sides, leaving part of the tower in a neighbouring garden, the owner of which once claimed half