NOTICES OF CERTAIN LYCHNOSCOPES, OR LOW SIDE WINDOWS, EXISTING IN CHURCHES IN THE WEST OF ENGLAND.
The history and use of Lychnoscopes, or "low side windows," as they are called in the Oxford Glossary, remains so obscure, that any addition, however slight, to the information already collected on the subject may not be without interest.
It is probably unknown to many who have engaged in Ecclesiological researches, that the remote district of the Lizard Point in Cornwall contains a group of four, if not five, coæval examples of this remarkable feature in the details of architectural arrangement, which well deserve to be noticed.
The churches in which they occur are those of Mawgan, Grade, Cury, Landewednack, and Wendron, all within a range of fifteen miles north from the Lizard Point. Each church has a transept, and Grade has both north and south transepts: whilst at Wendron the transept is placed on the north, and at the other three, on the south side. In the four first-named churches the "low window" occurs at the south-east angle of junction of the transept with the chancel, but at Wendron it is found in the north wall of the chancel and somewhat removed from the angle of the transept.
The example at Mawgan is the largest and best, and may be thus described:[1]—the inner angle, at junction of the transept and chancel walls, is cut away from the floor upwards to the height of six feet, and laterally about five feet, in south and east directions from the angle. A stout octagonal pillar, six feet high, supports all that remains of the angle of these walls, whilst the walls themselves rest upon two flat segmental arches of three feet span, springing at right angles to each other, eastwards and southwards from the pillar. The faces of the pillar are five and a half inches each in width.
A low diagonal wall is built across the angle thus exposed, and a small lean-to roof is run up from it into the external
- ↑ See the three cuts on the following pages.
