St. James the Great - The Porch

Barbaric heads from a corbel-table

The church of St. James the Great in Norton is kept locked except for services and occasional coffee mornings, like most of the mediaeval churches that I have visited, and I didn’t have the opportunity to explore its interior; however, the outer doorway to its porch is open and there are several interesting details to see here.

The doorway to the porch

The Historic England List Entry Summary describes the porch as having a “plain C13 style outer doorway with restored responds” and refers to six reset headstones, as well as the Norman mask corbels, which are alternatively described as “barbaric heads from a corbel-table” in the principal resource that the writer uses - Pevsner, N, Radcliffe, E, The Buildings of England: Yorkshire: The West Riding, (1967), 479.

Sculpted corbel brackets

I didn’t stop long enough to examine the various stones very closely but yellow/orange coloured Grenoside Sandstone is the principal building stone – seen in the dressings especially – with the green/grey Greenmoor Rock used mainly for the grave slabs.

A view of some reset grave slabs

The very heavily restored chevron decorated Norman doorway is also quite yellow and, looking up, the very fine Victorian rib vaulted ceiling is very striking with its uniform colour. The latter reminds me of Holy Trinity church in Wentworth, where I once thought that it would be a very difficult stone “to match” - if it was ever in need of repair.

The south doorway of the church of St. James the Great

This interesting church merits another visit soon, to take a good look at its interior and to re-examine a few puzzling details that I had noted when quickly looking around its exterior.

  

A reset grave slab