Rushall, Wiltshire

We eschewed the idea of exciting as-yet-unseen tympanums and beakheads this trip. I can't quite tell if it's because I didn't want a long drive (sounds legitimate) or whether I / we are getting completist and want to see every last damn Norman font in Wiltshire. That sounds a bit perfectionist and obsessive though. Perhaps it's come to that. The 'obsessive journeying' bit has turned out to be true. I don't think I care.

First stop was Rushall, down a bucolic lane with sheep grazing quietly in the fields. The church is apparently some distance from the rest of the village. The door was welcomingly open and all was airy and with a pleasant atmosphere.

Drawing this, I actually managed to shut the inner voice up for a while. But I find I still don't pay enough attention to the overall shape, the way the size of the parts relate to each other. So I made the stem too long, but photoshop has dealt with this well enough. The octagonalness made me feel a bit suspicious, it doesn't seem to be much of a thing in most of Wiltshire. But here isn't far from Upavon and its fancy 8-sided font. So I'll go along with it though it feels like a 'late' feature. I liked the feathery fingery base and its strangely ruff-like top. The Blurb in the church suggested it was an upside-down Norman column and that's rather believable. In fact here it is turned the other way up:

So you're getting two amounts of Norman sculpture for one, which was especially good in a church that was otherwise far too modern and bland for our specialist tastes to hold anything else as ancient and interesting. And what's more, this font rates highly on the 'inoffensive font cover' scale, it was very unobtrusive. The font gets pride of place in the centre of the tower base. It was peaceful here and I wish we'd driven down a little bit further to the bridge over the River Avon - it looks lovely on Google's streetview.