Multum in Parva...

...is the motto of the County of Rutland, the smallest of all the English Counties and perhaps unsurprisingly one with a very fierce sense of its own identity.

Having a day off today, the first for a month, I headed north up the A1 to see what treasures might be found in Rutland and East Leicestershire, to be rewarded by the amazingly sumptuous Norman Chapel at Tickencote. Multum in parva indeed! The little church was restored and partly rebuilt in 1792 when the West Front and South tower were added. The extraordinarily ornate exterior is buttressed in French style rather than English with demi-shafts. The first picture is of the unusual west front, done in a Romanesque style with a touch of Hawksmoor. This is the plainest aspect of the Church. By contrast the East front is highly decorated with intersecting arches, friezes, bland recesses and mouldings. It also reveals a room above the sanctuary - a feature of a number of Norman churches - though it is not certain whether this upper room overlooked the Church as at Compton or Melbourne. Here, the puzzle is, as at Iffley, why was such a sumptuous church built here?

Inside the mystery deepens as we find a sexpartite vault over the chancel. Traditional wisdom is that the sexpartite vault came to England after 1175 with William of Sens - but the church itself seems to be older than that - probably c1160. A clue may be found in those French style buttresses, for sexpartite vaults had been used in Normandy from very early in the century. So this appears to be a French Church rather than an English Norman one, hidden away in a quiet Rutland village.

But the true glory of the interior is the incredible triumphal arch that marks the entrance to the Chancel. This fivefold arch is described by Pevsner as being 'wildly overdone and in addition incompetently executed.'