Harbledown, Kent - St Nicholas

Taking advantage of a drop off back to Uni of the eldest I tried to visit St Nicholas but, despite being surrounded by Almshouses and other houses, it's kept locked so it was exteriors only - to be fair all three Kent churches were off bounds, albeit one was decommissioned and is now a private residence, so it must be a Kentish policy much like parts of my environs.

St Nicholas is absolutely stunning - truly one of the more striking churches I've visited...very different from the East Anglian church architecture I'm familiar with.

This was a planned visit based on my earlier visit to St Michael & All Angels.

HOSPITAL or ST NICHOLAS. Archbishop Lanfranc c. 1084 founded a leper hospital with a church for sixty inmates, half men, half women, ‘in devexo montis latere’, i.e. on the slope of Harbledown Hill that faces away from Canterbury, on the edge of that great and desolate forest, Blean Wood. Eadmer refers to ‘ligneas domos’. The present almshouses, for such the hospital has become since leprosy died out in England, date only from c.1840. But from the first there was a stone, or rather a flint, CHURCH. To appreciate this one must start at the E end of the N aisle; for there is the curving wall of the original apse, to which belonged a rectangular nave, now all gone but for the W wall. The W doorway has continuous zig-zag. Norman N aisle, with two original, unmoulded arches, scalloped E abacus, and a round pier with crudely but decisively carved spurs and capital. On the capital, two birds sharing a head. One original window, and another reset in the tower. This extended the N aisle to the W end of the nave. Pointed arches, but still scalloped abaci, i.e. evidence for its building late in the C12. Octagonal pier substituted in the C14. Contemporary S aisle, again with an octagonal pier inserted, and partial widening. Nice Dec square-headed window here. In the chancel all the evidence is C14, with two-light Dec windows of various designs. Plain tomb recess in the N wall. - STALLS. Old. Simple. - TILES. One in the nave shows a bent man in a hooded jerkin. - WALL PAINTING. Large figures of Mary and the Angel of the Annunciation, of c.1350, on the splays of the E window. - STAINED GLASS. C14 glass in the heads of all four chancel windows, Worth lingering over. Tiny censing angels in the E window. Two figures (heads renewed) in the NE window, and charming borders of fleurs-de-lys and Canterbury Bells. - PLATE. Four pre-Reformation Mazers, wood with rims and feet of silver. One is inset with an oval crystal, another has a silver-gilt medallion of Guy of Warwick slaying a dragon, datable to the early C14. - Elizabethan Cup and Paten Cover. — Cup, inscribed 1621.

Link to Mee's write up.

Flickr.