Site of Medieval Chapel at Blackwell

Description of this historic site

Documentary evidence suggests that there was a chapel in Blackwell in the Medieval period.

Notes about this historic site

Site of a Medieval chapel.
1 The chapel of Blackwell was in existence before 1240. It was a demesne chapel of the Prior of Worcester, but belonged to the church of Tredington. The chapel was granted in 1549 to Richard Field and others and probably demolished.
2 Although sold off in 1549, the Chapel in fact still stands on the south side of the road coming into Blackwell from Ilmington. It consists of a chancel about six yards long and a nave about ten and a half yards long, with exposed foundations of a north porch. There is a string course around the external south and west walls of the chancel, with substantial reamins of the northernmost jamb and part of the sill of the east window in situ. The visible north wall of the chancel has at some point been rebuilt and displays the complete sill of a smaller ancient window, with some displaced portion of its jambs. Other shaped pieces of dressed stone form the capstones of the adjacent modern gateway. The nave has been foreshortened from the west by the erection of a new gable end within the old walls which still stand at the oresent eaves level. In these old walls are the ancient jambs of a north doorway with the weathered remains of a rudimentary scratch dial: implaying that particular stone and perhaps the whole doorway has been moved from the other side of the building. No remains of the ancinet windows are extant in the nave but the large portion of medieval plinth remains on the south side near the juncion with the chancel. When the chapel was refurbished last century to include a bathroom, a stone was removed from the wall and a small baby with parched skin was discovered. It was replaced in the wall and sealed up.
3 The old chapel still stands on the south side of Ilmington Road as part of Manor Cottage and consists of a chancel and a nave with the foundations of a north porch visible. The chapel is said to have been dedicated to St Polycarp, an early Christian martyr who was Bishop of Smyrna.
4 Location moved based upon evidence in 3. The location of this medieval chapel and the Methodist Chapel seem to have been conflated.

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