Doddington (Lincs) St Peter's church interior (26540868965)

The earliest record of a church on this site is in the Domesday survey of 1085 when St Peter’s Abbey at Westminster owned the village and over 900 years ago this church was also dedicated to St Peter. The only physical evidence that the Norman church stood on the same site is the presence of part of a round-headed Norman arch, which can be seen embedded in the rough outer stone surface of the Chancel north wall. In 1770 Lord Delaval, owner of the Doddington estate, realised that the church was in a ruinous state of disrepair, so much so that the only solution was to carry out a complete rebuild. It is also relevant that Lord Delaval had already spent a considerable fortune on modernising the Hall and its estate, and he saw the rebuilding of the church as the opportunity to make a serious architectural statement. His choice of the Gothick style certainly related to the rather sombre and romantic interior of the newly refurbished Hall, and it is a measure of his position in fashionable society that the Gothick transformation went on in parallel with Horace Walpole’s creation of his iconic Gothick masterpiece Strawberry Hill. To create his new Gothick church Lord Delaval demolished most of the old building, except the north wall of the Chancel and nave together with the Lady Chapel from which he borrowed the style for his new church. He built a copy of the Lady Chapel on the south side of the widened nave, using the salvaged arcade. By this architectural sleight of hand he created the wide, light and airy space that is present today. A tower and spire over the church entrance completed his composition, and he integrated the whole design by running the battlements of the Lady Chapel round the whole building, and decorating its skyline with crocketed pinnacles. The new structure was built of brick, clad in dressed Ancaster stone to match the Lincoln Limestone of the Lady Chapel. The spire was wooden, clad in elegant herringbone lead, but in 1949 it had to be dismantled because of decay in the woodwork. Lord Delaval decorated the entrance to his new church with a pair of niches and an ogee arch; all dressed in foliate stone carving. At this point the impression received if of light-hearted Strawberry Hill Gothick rather than pure Gothic revival. 800 people attended the dedication of the new church, but no one from the Delaval family. John Delaval,, Lord Delaval’s only son and heir to the whole Seaton Delaval fortune, was critically ill with consumption in Bath, and within a fortnight he was dead. For his funeral in St Peter’s, Lord Delaval in a typically Delaval gesture had the whole inside of the church painted charcoal black, a colour that was not painted out for 65 years. A fragment of this colour has been preserved in the church.