Naughton

Noted in Parker (1855): "Font, N[orman]; an octagon, with intersecting arches round the bowl." Cautley (1938) illustrates a baptismal font at Naughton that has obviously been re-cut and re-carved; his caption to the photograph reads: "Originally a square arcaded bowl". Cautley (1982) dates the font to the 12th century. In 1938, and indeed in Parker's own time, 1855, the basin already appeared octagonal, mounted on a plain octagonal pedestal. Noted and illustrated in Knott (2008): "The font below is a delight. It has been reset in the blocked north door, which looks rather well, actually. It was obviously a square Norman bowl, of a kind common in this part of the world. At some point, the corners have been cut off to make it octagonal, and a little sequence of blank arcades have been worked into one of the faces." The present position of the font makes only three sides visible and, of those, only the central side has a few round arches of a blind intersecting arcade. The basin was obviously converted into an octagon by simply removing the four original corners, leaving thus eight sides of approximately equal size; thankfully there was no attempt at removing the remaining ornamentation, although there probably was further trimming to make the basin shallower. Naughton is located only a few km west of Preston and Kettlebaston, both of them owing Norman square fonts [cf. Index entries for both], and its font may have originally been of the same type; the town of Great Bricett, just north of Naughton, as another square font -of a later date- with a similar intersecting arcade on one of its sides.