C O N T E X T 1 7 2 : J U N E 2 0 2 2 43 patron of the united Shipton benefice: Shipton Sollars had been combined with Shipton Oliffe in 1776. This enabled him in 1929 to embark on restoration of the church in memory of his parents (his father, William John Fieldhouse, had bought Shipton Sollars Manor in 1910). He commissioned an ecclesiastical architect, William Elbert Ellery Anderson, for whom Shipton Sollars was one of his first commissions in Gloucestershire after coming to Cheltenham. Anderson was a member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, so was wellsuited to restore this church, which he obviously embarked on with enthusiasm. ‘Restoration’ meant not just repairing but returning the building to how his antiquarian interest suggested it may have been at a much earlier time. Ernest Fieldhouse died in 1962, his wife Evelyn in 1986; their grave in front of the pulpit is marked with a simple monumental inscription. The Jacobean pulpit had been painted blue; under Ellery Anderson’s supervision, it was stripped and polished. There was an hourglass on the wall beside it – one of the features which remained in 1870 when the church was in a state of severe decay. Unhappily, the original has been stolen but in 1998 it was replaced by the present one. ‘Fieldhouse’ was also commemorated by a rebus in the stained glass in the perpendicularstyle window in the south wall of the chancel, and beside it a ship, a rebus for ‘Shipton’ (historically, of course, Shipton was not named from a ship but from sheep). Thick blue paint, on top of 16 layers of whitewash, covered the plaster throughout the church. When removed, traces of wall paintings were found, and consecration crosses on chancel and nave walls. Candleholders were installed below them to illuminate the dark ochre painted crosses. More were later found, and traces of consecration crosses on the plaster on the outside of the south wall of both chancel and nave, now very worn; plaster has generally been removed from outside walls. Benches were removed, and the chancel panelled. Ellery Anderson’s work was thorough. In the course of excavating around the walls, a 13th-century stone pattée cross was found and erected as a finial on the east end of the chancel. The priest’s door into the chancel was probably removed at this time and the outside wall repaired, while the north door into the nave was opened. North doors were often blocked up when processions no longer left the church that way and entered at the south door. At Shipton Sollars the north door faced the road; worshippers walked round the west end to reach the south door, which led across the churchyard into the manor house grounds. A lantern had been installed to light the walk round.The south The church was enlarged and rebuilt in the 15th century, the likely date of the nave roof. Following restoration in 1929, the nave is uncluttered. The lantern on the outside of the northwest corner matches the ironwork inside the church. Nearly 100 years old, it is in need of restoration.
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