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Why Round Towers?
Rural myths
Real history
Where are they?
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| Flint walling |
Round tower churches tend to be found where there is a lack of conventional stone to use for building. In much of East Anglia, the only stone to be found is flint. Flint occurs as comparatively small and knobbly individual stones, not as slabs which can be cut up into blocks. Many handsome buildings have been built with walls of flint set in mortar, but something stronger is needed at the corners where two walls meet. So a typical flint church will have stone blocks forming the corners of the main body of the church. It cost money to bring the stone from a distance, and to have it cut to shape (“dressed”). It was cheaper to build the church tower without any expensive stone corners -- by making it round.
It seems that in the flint area most early churches had round towers, but that the costlier square towers carried more prestige. Some round towers were later rebuilt in the more fashionable square style when the congregation could afford it. Part of the charm of visiting round tower churches is that they tend to be found hidden in small country villages, because these are the places where there was never enough money for major rebuilding. These churches are time capsules handed down from our ancestors.
Some buildings in East Anglia have walls or panels of knapped flint, a well-known example being Saint Andrew's Hall in Norwich. The flints are cut (or "knapped") to show their glassy grey interior, and may be trimmed to fit together closely. This technique was not used until after most of the round tower churches were built, and was expensive. Round towers were built from uncut flints set in plenty of mortar, showing the grey, white or brown exterior of the stones. Some round towers are neatly faced with rounded flints (perhaps from the sea-shore) set in even rows as at Thwaite in the picture. At the other extreme some show an uneven mixture of anything hard that could be found locally (even including Roman bricks at Burgh Castle).
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| Thwaite |
Round tower churches are so old that there are legends about how the round towers came to be. One local story is that the round towers were actually built as wells. Then a great flood washed the ground away, leaving the well walls uselessly sticking in the air. So the resourceful people built their churches against them, using the wells as a bell towers! This story is given a (very slight) touch of credibility by the fact that much of the East Anglian coast suffers from erosion, which does give rise to strange relics of lost settlements -- including a cliff fall leaving a brick-lined well standing on the beach at Pakefield, Suffolk in 1956.
Another unlikely story links the round towers to the round stone rings of prehistory, such as that at Stonehenge. This theory says that the round towers were the original sites of worship with the conventional rectangular buildings added later. Some round churchyards have been linked to re-use of pagan sites, but it is hard to see how a round tower fitted into the rites.
A slightly more credible theory is that the towers were built for defence against the Vikings, as lookout posts and as somewhere for the population to hide behind safe walls. A round tower church is often sited on a hill top, but this was to remain the favoured place to build a village church long after the Viking raids had ceased. In fact the Viking raids were almost over before the first known date of any round tower church. There are similarities between the church towers and the round towers in Scotland and Ireland that were built for defence against raiders, but it is now thought that these similarities relate to how round stone towers were built rather than to how such towers were used.
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| Athelstan and St Cuthbert |
King Athelstan, like his grandfather King Alfred the Great, was a remarkable ruler. He was able to unite most of present-day England, regaining much of the North-East from Viking rule. (Under his rule many descendants of Vikings remained on their land. These included the inhabitants of some of the villages which still have their round tower churches. The name ending in -by is a pointer to a Viking settlement.)
In 937 King Athelstan issued a law laying down what was needed for a local leader to claim the status of thegn (as in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor). One requirement was that the thegn’s land must have a bell tower on it. It is possible that some of our round towers owe their existence to this decree. There is evidence that a few of them were built onto pre-existing churches.There is discussion about how many of the surviving round tower churches date from Saxon times before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The founder of the Round Tower Churches Society, W.J.Goode, spent many years studying the churches and favours a high figure. Recent work by expert and RTCS Council Member Stephen Hart places the number rather lower. He calculates that there are 181 old churches with visible round towers in England, including those attached to ruins and those that have lost their upper stages. He says that in Norfolk there are 22 definitely Saxon round tower churches, 10 with an overlap of Saxon and Norman features, and 25 definitely Norman out of the 126 in total in the county. For Suffolk, his figures are 2 Saxon, 2 overlap, and 12 Norman out of 42 churches in all. For the rest of England, he thinks none are Saxon and 6 are Norman out of a total of 13.
The Society knows of about 185 round tower churches which were built in England using the traditional techniques. In East Anglia there are 126 in Norfolk, 42 in Suffolk, 7 in Essex, and 2 in Cambridgeshire. Other round tower churches are found in Southern England in Sussex and Berkshire. The Round Tower Churches Society has made grants to about 150 of these churches.
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| Bardfield Saling |
Germany has evidence of 20 round tower churches, mostly 12th century and quite similar to those in East Anglia. Other countries with at least one round tower church are Andorra, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, Norway, Poland.and South Africa.
In Norfolk alone, from either ruins or documentary evidence, it is known that there were at least another 30 round tower churches. In 1991, on the night of 29th August , the round tower of the church of All Saints at Cockley Cley, Norfolk fell down . Two others have fallen in the last 50 years.
One of the newest round tower churches is St Stephen’s at Higham, Suffolk, built in 1861. It was designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, who is famous as the architect who designed the Albert Memorial in London.
We have a webpage with our selected "top twenty" churches to visit, which includes links to maps to find them.
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