extensive land for what seems like a bargain price and your neighbour might be a quarter of a mile away. There is a slightly spooky feel to it all. Myself, I can imagine going quietly mad if I lived there!

It was on a boat that I first visited Upwell (and Outwell). Back in the day I was as much a canal enthusiast as I am now a church enthusiast. The village famously has the navigable Well Creek running straight through it. Or, more accurately perhaps, the settlement hugs its banks. Well Creek was, in mediaeval days, part of the course of the River Nene. In those days the river converged with the River Great Ouse just before they shared an outfall into The Wash. In those days Wisbech, just five miles away, was a coastal port. In days when overland transport was slow, hazardous and cripplingly expensive the Nene was an important commercial artery, taking produce and even limestone, from the Midlands to the sea and thence to London. Today, when Peterborough and London are are a hundred miles and just two hours apart by car this seems almost inconceivable but such were the economics of mediaeval transport. In the eighteenth century the course of the river was rerouted between Peterborough and the sea, thus leaving Upwell (and Outwell) - literally - on a backwater”.

“And talking of limestone, this church is made from Barnack stone, one of the most famous of all English quarry stones and used in the  construction of four cathedrals. Barnack (which also has a famous church) is a couple of miles outside Stamford  in Lincolnshire - and you can still walk your dog over the site of the  quarry!. At a distance of only ten to twelve miles the cost of road  transport exceeded the cost of the stone itself. We can be pretty sure  then that the stone got to Upwell and Outwell   by being taken by boat along the River Welland to where it meets the sea at the western end of the Wash;  thence by sea to Kings Lynn at the eastern end of The Wash for the short river journey to Upwell and Outwell on the Nene.” 

In many ways Outwell’s church is the poor relation of the two. It is smaller in scale. Its angel roof, which is undoubtedly of interest, cannot stand comparison with Upwell’s which is amongst the finest in England. It cannot compete with the fine doorways at Upwell either. It does, however, have intriguing wooden sculptures of interest and rather lovely mediaeval stained glass in its south chapel. It is worth a visit and visiting the two churches one after the other is a satisfying experience.

Like Upwell, externally St Clement is overwhelmingly Perpendicular in style and the battlemented parapets equally in your face. It is also similar to Upwell in that its earliest part is the lower sections of the west tower is of the thirteenth century with later Perpendicular insertions, notably its large west window. The perpendicular windows and battlements, however, disguise  the fact that the nave and aisles are of the fourteenth century are are more in the Decorated style. An extended fifteenth and early sixteenth century remodelling gave us today’s extended chancel as well as chapels on both sides. the south chapel is the earlier of the two and its glory is its west window of mediaeval glass with numerous images of saints.

The roof is modest compared with Upwell’s, its angels nice enough but not with the impressive outspread wings of the other church nor of the angel roofs of Suffolk nor of March - the finest of them all - only eleven miles away.  It does, however, have intriguing imagery on its wall posts and corbels. Its external grotesques are also well worth a look.

Left: Looking to the east. The Perpendicular east window has yellow glass for some unfathomable reason. Above the chancel arch is a fairly unusual west-facing window, Note the symmetrical arcades, evidencing  their being built at about the same time. Right: The A portion of angel roof in the north aisle

Left: Looking to the west end. Note the small window at the top of the tower wall. Right: The nave ceiling. The cross beams are adorned with somewhat luridly-painted angels with outstretched wings. In between are there are horizontal angels projecting from the wall plates.

Left: The south aisle angel roof looking towards the west. Centre: Looking along the south aisle to the south chapel. It is late fifteenth century. The window has mediaeval glass in the tracery showing images of the saints and is arguably the most important treasure in the church. Right: The Purbeck marble monument of 1512 to Nicholas Beaupre and his wife.

Left: The inscription at the rear of Nicholas Beaupre’s monument. Centre and Right: Angels on the nave ceiling. They seem to be cheerful members of their species.

These five pictures are of corbels of the nave ceiling surmounted by timber roof trusses which have hard-to-see carved figures. The corbels have a first half of the fifteenth century look to them.  The figures have a common theme of a large figure with its hands on the shoulders of a smaller figure below. It is impossible to understand the theme, let alone to identify the figures. The presence of a woman in a fashionable and much-mocked horned headdress (second left) disabuses us of any notion that the main figures are either holy or saintly. Its presence here is also of interest in dating this ceiling. Rosalie Gilbert is the best source on mediaeval women’s clothing (and of mediaeval women in general) and she dates this style as of being the height of fashion in 1410-20, although she reckons it persisted for some time afterwards. See her website: https://rosaliegilbert.com/. This ceiling, then, post dates the nave which was reckoned to be of the later fourteenth century. Equally obviously, the clerestory which supports this ceiling must also be of the early fifteenth century. This might imply that there was one continuous development of the nave that culminated in the clerestory and ceiliing. As I have explained elsewhere, female headwear is one of the most reliable ways of dating because monuments to the upper class women who wore such garments are usually dated. For a woman to be wearing a style in 1430 that was the height of fashion in 1410 would be like a woman wearing hot pants in the 1990s. The caveats we must place on this are that the crafts men might be less aware of sartorial development. But we can safely say that they could not predict fashion either so this ceiling could not, for example, date from 1390. The pictures here are, I confess, lousy and to make them visible at all I have had to revert to black and white! Neither of my two post-production programs could produce anything of good quality.

The splendid saints in the tracery of the fifteenth century window of the south chapel.

Left: The figure of St Lawrence, clutching the grid iron on which we was roasted! Centre: Virgin and Christ with two other female figures. Right: The tracery of the east window of the chancel has fragmented mediaeval glass.

These wallplates are in the south aisle. There are two figures performing handstands . Elsewhere we can see a grotesque figure, a sun and possibly a Tudor rose.

If grotesques float your boat the Outwell offers much more than Upwell. See particularly a woman riding a man with her hands around his beard (top left). And I rather think we have an exhibitionist (bottom left)

The church from the south west. Although it arguably loses out to Upwell in terms of grandeur, it is by no means an insubstantial church - see that huge south aisle window, for example. Although Upwell’s angel roof and doors have a “wow” factor, there is plenty of interest in Outwell - you just have to look for it!

Footnote - The Wisbech & Upwell Railway

All of my four children will remember the “Thomas the Tank Engine” stories  by the Rev W, Awdry with great affection. They had all of the books, cassette tapes of the stories (yes, I’m afraid it was that far back) narrated by Johnny Morris and watched the TV series narrated by no less than Ringo Starr! One of their favourite locomotives was Toby the Tram Engine, a tiny and unorthodox little locomotive with its wheels covered by sideplates and a device called a “cow catcher”  which was there to clear the tracks of any obstructions including, one presumes - and hopefully gently - cows. To this day, the family Wall might stumble on something lost or unexpected and say “Aha. Aha-a-ah. Where’s your cowcatcher then!” To which the required answer is (in a very reedy voice) “Please sir, I don’t catch cows”.

Toby was based  upon a real locomotive on a real railway and that railway was the Wisbech & Upwell Railway. Remarkably, it was a largely passenger railway originally but freight traffic was its bread and butter. Farm produce from the Upwell and Outwell area was transported to Wisbech and coal (am I still allowed to use that word?) went in the other direction. Opened in 1883, it survived remarkably until 1966. Because the railway mainly operated alongside roads the locos were required to have their wheels covered as well as other unorthodox “safety” measures.

Outwell had two stations: Outwell Village and Outwell Basin. Upwell had just the one. The unorthodox design of the locomotive built for this line (and upon which Awdry based Toby the Tram Engine) is shown in the photograph below. They were built in 1883 at Stratford Works and, remarkably, were not scrapped until 1952 when they were replaced by more powerful and more conventional locos.

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