Dedication : Holy Trinity                            Simon Jenkins: **                                   Principal Features : The finest Anglo-Saxon arcades in Britain

Great Paxton is a small village on the outskirts of St Neots in Cambridgeshire. It is set well back from the road and is not easily visible. Externally it looks unremarkable but the sharp-eyed church enthusiast will spot a nave of unusual height and a clerestory with round-headed windows. For this church is one of only three surviving Anglo-Saxon aisled churches in England. The others are Brixworth in Northants and Lydd in Kent - and precious little of the Anglo-Saxon church remains at Lydd. As Pevsner notes, Brixworth has aisle arches that are simply cut into the wall. Great Paxton, however, has arcades that are formed of carved piers and columns. This is the only place in England where you can see this.

It isn’t clear why such a church should be here: few Anglo-Saxon churches were built of stone. That this one is means that it was likely to have housed a monastic foundation. Moreover, King Edward the Confessor held land here so perhaps that is a clue. Not for the first time, I am forced to comment that “Anglo-Saxon” is a pretty useless term architecturally. Great Paxton was built in the early to mid eleventh century whereas the earliest parts of Brixworth date from the 8th century. They might be Anglo-Saxon in the historical sense but Great Paxton has little more architectural affinity with Brixworth than it does with the Perpendicular church of nearby St Neots! In truth, both Brixworth and Great Paxton are pretty well unique.

Great Paxton is clearly of the Romanesque style of architecture: it had the aisles and clerestory characteristic of the Roman basilica and probably

Above: Looking towards the west and the c13 chancel.                                 Right:   Looking west.

The lofty arch that led to the long-disappeared north transept of the original church. This would, of course, have been one of four arches at the church’s “crossing”, probably supporting a central tower.

Above the bays of the south aisle there are still two deeply-splayed Anglo-Saxon clerestory windows.

And talking of “bodgers”...this is what was contrived to replace the south-western bay of the arcade, presumably when the western tower was added. The western respond of the original arch was shifted inwards and with almost comical ineptitude a totally lopsided pointed “arch” was made using the eastern part of the oirginal Anglo-Saxon arch.

The south transept arch is considerably lower than its northern counterpart, but we can see very clearly that the old Anglo-Saxon arch has been replaced by a much lower Gothic

The eastern face of the north transept arch has the same pattern of clustered piers supporting simple bulbous capitals as is seen in the aisle arcades.

|The rectangular chancel probably replaced an apsidal one.

Close-ups of the south chancel arch capitals (left) and northern ones (right) suggest that they were originally identical but that the southern ones were hacked about to facilitate the replacement of the arch.

It is interesting to look at the clerestory from the outside. The sheer geometrical regularity of the windows on the inside has you wondering whether they were sympathetic later additions, but the exterior view leaves you in no doubt. Note the use of small stones to make the arches. On the western end there is half of a blocked window giving the only external evidence that part of this end of the church was lost to accommodate the tower.

The church from its “traditional” south eastern view, with the usual collection of unremarkable gothic windows, offers remarkably little evidence of the church’s origins.