North End

A quick Google reveals that this is a rare wood framed medieval chapel with priest house attached. Sadly viewing is by appointment only (a phrase I would more closely associate with estate agents rather than ecclesiastical circles)which I didn't have; so I took an exterior and went off to the more welcoming St Andrew at Barnston.

BLACK CHAPEL. The rare case of a surviving entirely timber framed ecclesiastical building, and also the rare case of a medieval chapel with attached priest’s house. The chapel was of nave and chancel in one, the house is set to the W at r. angles and projects to the N. In the house are two original windows and remains of the roof. The chapel inside looks lovely - not in the original but in an early C19 way. Gothick window casements; on the S side the windows rise into dormers in the roof. Box pews, and a W gallery with a tiny organ on it.  SCREEN. Humble C15 work. - BENCHES. A complete set of simple design. 

FORD END. If we are looking for quaintness we find it here. Not in the handsome modern church with its figures of the evangelists on the tower, but some way off, at the hamlet of North End, where a famous little building has been standing 500 years. Black Chapel it is called, and as with its dormer windows it looks like a cottage the traveller might easily pass it by. It is a little church with a house joining on, parts having been added in the 18th century, though the nave and chancel are medieval, and so is the dwelling where the old priest lived. The walls are timber-framed, and there is a bellcot with a pyramid roof. Some of the nave beams are medieval, and look down on two very different fashions in furniture, benches from Henry the Seventh’s time and box-pews from the 18th century. There are altar rails of the time of Queen Anne, whose painted arms hang over the tiny altar; a Tudor screen; and a barrel organ to remind us of the way they made music here 200 years ago.