Hexton

St Faith was submerged in a sea of scaffolding and was, naturally locked. It's undergoing an apparently major restoration and I've marked it as a revisit although I'm not totally convinced that it would be rewarding.

ST FAITH. Early C19, except for some details of nave and W tower. The latter has recently partly collapsed. The nave piers are circular on the S, quatrefoil on the N side. Can that be a capricious C19 invention, as the Royal Commission seems to believe, or must one assume a nave and aisles of c. 1300? Box pews and a reading desk placed symmetrically. The S chancel chapel is nice pre-archaeological Neo-Gothic, complete with vault and the Commandment Boards, etc. - PLATE. Pieces of 1818-27. which probably dates the restoration of the church. - MONUMENTS. Plain tablet to Peter Taverner d. 1601 and his wife, who ‘was a grave, prudent, provident, above her sexe learned, and religious matron’. - One epitaph of 1845 by Gaffin.

Hexton. We may wonder if any village in the county has a more delightful setting than this. It lies in the shadow of the Barton Hills (a group of the Chilterns) and we came to it by a street paved with gold, for the laburnums on each side had just showered their bloom. Dark yews surround the church, which inherits from the 15th century its tower and a roof supported by gilded wooden angels. The fabric was much refashioned c. 1825. There is a handsome early 19th-century double-decker seat for the priest and the clerk, and a pulpit to match. A king smiles from one of the arcades, and a woman weeps for Josep de Latour, a Guardsman who rebuilt much of the church. There is a record that the church was dedicated to St Faith early in the 12th century, but it was long before the days of records that men built the earthwork fort of Ravensburgh Castle on a spur of these hills, nearly 500 feet up. Trees now screen the ramparts, which still rise nearly 20 feet high, enclosing more than twenty acres of this steep hillside.