This is the sixth snippet from my work looking at graffiti in the church.
There appear to be two drawings here, a house at the bottom and a circular feature higher up. The house is fairly clear with a round topped door, a window with central divide, and a triangular roof with overhanging eaves. There is also a suggestion of a chimney where a bit of the surface is missing. That might have been caused by trying to cut the two edges of the chimney close to each other or it might just have been knocked off by accident, like other patches of similar size.
The only clear element of the circular feature above the house is the circle itself, accurately cut with dividers or something similar around a central hole. But it’s not clear whether any of the other marks are part of the same pattern? The initials ‘CH’ above it are probably separate. If they were related one might expect them to be central or to the left relative to the circle. The crude ‘8’ in the lower right quadrant also looks unconnected.
It is tempting to see the mass in the lower part of the wheel as a bell and the thick line coming up from it as the bell’s stay but that seems unlikely from an artist with a tool able to produce the sharply incised circle.Also the left hand edge of the ‘bell’ seems to be part of a random scratch running up through the whole wheel, and the ‘stay’ is one of a set of parallel marks probably caused when the stone was dressed.
Are the house and the circle connected? The distance between them would suggest not but there’s an almost complete rectangle surround them both. It appears to have two horizontal dividers, one touching the tip of the house and one cutting through the circle. Was this drawn at the same time, before or after?
There is a large vertical cut between the circle and the left side of the rectangle, and a shallow ellipse at the bottom of it spanning the rectangle. But like so many features of the graffiti, its significance is unclear.
John Harrison (July 2026)
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