St Nicholas, Landwade

St Nicholas is a Grade II* chapel in the grounds of Landwade Hall, now in the Suffolk parish of Exning with Landwade and the Diocese of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich. It is privately owned and stands beside a scheduled moated site.

Overview

Historic England records a cruciform church with west tower built about 1445 for Sir Walter Cotton. The fabric is flint and pebble rubble, originally plastered, with re-used Barnack stone and limestone dressings and clunch inside. Roofs are Welsh slate, with a plain-tile pyramidal cap to the two-stage embattled tower. Mid-nineteenth-century gault-brick buttresses support the west face of the tower. Transept crossings open through two-bay arcades into Cotton memorial chapels. The nave and chancel share a six-bay roof of arch-braced trusses on carved corbels. A mid-fifteenth-century rood screen with ogee arches and benches with poppy heads survive, with fragments of fifteenth-century glass.

Monuments to the Cotton family span the sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries, including the north-transept tomb of Sir John Cotton (d.1593) and south-transept recumbent figures. The church passed from Cambridgeshire into Suffolk with the 1994 boundary change and remains a chapel associated with Exning rather than an ordinary parish church. Access is by private road and a public footpath.

Further Information

• Historic England list entry 1162203
• British Listed Buildings: Church of St Nicholas, Landwade
• Exning parish