Little Wigborough

Noted in Pevsner (1976): "Font cover support [...] scrolly and artistic", Victorian. The If-City Newsletter 1 March 2005 [www.ip-city.com/ViewArticle.asp?NewsID=10688Category=5] quoted Trudi Hughes, English Heritage's Historic Buildings Surveyor for the East of England Region stating that funding and technical help had been given to the parish church of Little Wigborough for, among other things, to rectify the problem created by the subsiding of ther floor that had resulted in "the font sitting at an angle of some 10 degrees from the horizontal". On the same date the BBC News [http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4309361.stm] reported comments from Rev. Sam Norton of Little Bigborough St. Nicholas' regarding the restoration to use of the baptismal font. [NB: though the cover is clearly dated as Victorian in Pevsner and other sources, none mention the font itself; the fabric of the church is 15th-century, but the building was seriously damaged in the 1884 earthquake and restored in 1888 -- unknown whether the font predates the restoration or not]. The font consists of an octagonal basin decorated with a row of floral motif under the rim, and a row of balls at the lower end, raised on a base of clustered columns and an octagonal plinth. The wooden cover is an octagonal pyramid and is raised via a wrought-iron bracket on the north wall. Bettley & Pevsner (2007) suggest the bracket is by J. Clarke, responsible also for the overall restoration of 1885-1886 [NB: we have no information on the font of the late-medieval church]