Saturday 2.

The above two pictures are of a part of Ringshall Church (a few miles away from us) that I find very interesting. If you look just to the right of the centre of the top  photo you will see the end of one of the beams protruding from the wall, with a large oak peg shoved through it from below and securing the beam to the wall. The photo below shows the same beam inside the church. Both ends of all the cross beams go through the church walls and are secured in the same manner, which is used in the few surviving examples of late medieval furniture. If you now look again at the top picture you will see that the roof of the church was replaced and lowered, probably late in the 1400s. The walls of the nave are noticeably leaning outward, this is fairly common, quite deliberate, and is thought to have been done to give, from the outside, the impression that the church is taller than it is. I've just had to nip upstairs and ask Ann the correct name for this- it's called an optical illusion. The odd way of securing the beam ends also prevents the walls from leaning out any further. It's an early method of doing what was done in later centuries by putting an iron bar across the inside of a building, and through both opposite  outside walls, threading both ends of the bar outside the building, then putting on a large, usually round, pierced iron plate against the wall, heating the bar to expand it, and then screwing a huge iron nut up to the plate at both ends of the bar.
As far as I'm aware this is the only example of an ancient stone building being held together with large (about four to five feet long) wooden pegs, and is therefore unique. I'd be interested to know if any of my readers know otherwise. If you do please give me details.

P.s. I know I said I was going to blog about churches and this is only one church, but I've probably exhausted the attention span of my readers (and who could blame them) so I'll keep the others for when I next need photoes for a blog subject .