http://boar.org.uk/abiwta5BourneChancel(fig1.htm Latest edit 8 Nov 2009

©R.J.PENHEY2008

Bourne Archive.

The Abbey Church, Bourne.

Photographic Evidence for Dating the Structure of the Chancel.

Figure 1. The North Exterior.

Bourne Abbey: north wall of the chancel: middle bay. The east bay, to the left appears to be late medieval while the other two are later, probably 1807. The old wall is a little thicker than the new. The two buttresses in the picture seem alike but close inspection shows most of the eastern buttress to be medieval as is its counterpart on the south front. At their designed ground level, they both project by just under a metre. The western of the buttresses here is of the early nineteenth century, though it has been built to resemble the other. It does not project so far and has one storey fewer; again, as on the south side. The top stage of the eastern buttress and the wall above it look like part of the 1807 work. The lowest stage visible here is still scarred by what looks like shot damage from light, field artillery, perhaps a harquebus. However, in one instance the ball has caught a corner and continued into the face of the wall. The secondary damage is higher than the primary and indicates that the shot was fired from only about five metres away from the wall, depending on the height of the man’s shoulder and on any change in ground level since the seventeenth century. From that range, a musket ball would probably have been capable of causing the damage. There is one other shot strike remaining on the buttress. Like the first, it is on a corner. Whether this too was deflected onto the face of the wall can not be said because the wall at present adjacent to it is part of the early nineteenth century work. A repair has been made higher up the buttress. That shows as whiter stone and perhaps represents a third bullet strike. Why the bullets should be concentrated on the buttress rather than spreading far onto the face of the medieval wall to the east is an interesting question. One possibility is that these were shots inaccurately aimed at a window in the central bay.

That window will not have been the present, early nineteenth century one but was probably larger, maybe extending almost to the buttress. The existing window matches that on the south front and is consistent with an early nineteenth century Gothick style. The design of the stonework around its lights matches that of the wooden trusses in the present chancel roof but this is a feature of the 1930 rebuild of the roof at its rather steeper pitch. Old photographs owned by the Abbey Church show that the purlins of the much flatter, 1807 roof used to rest directly on the slightly arched tie beams. The ridge piece did essentially the same, though a simple block of wood. The building to the right houses the organ and was built in 1869 with its eastern wall simply abutting onto the 1807 buttress. Its unfinished, coursed rubble was fashionable in the 1860s.

Figure 1a. The shot has removed the corner of one course of masonry and the surface of another, higher course. On the buttress, the opposite corner has been damaged but there, the adjacent wall is an early nineteenth century rebuild. By looking at photographs which are of sufficiently low resolution to work well on a web page, it is not really possible to tell that this damage is not spalling of the stone as a result of frost damage. Indeed, that is a possibility but a view of the stone itself does not give this impression.

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