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Lowesby is a church shrouded in mystery. I once visited a church in a very odd corner of Mexico. They have a very strange brand of Catholicism and if you take a photograph in there the police (who are dressed in sheepskins and carry long wooden staves) will smash your camera and, if they are in a very bad mood, they will smash you too. Or tie you naked to a stake on a Sunday. And I am NOT kidding. They actually surrounded me and looked through all of the pictures on my camera, all 100+ of them twice, one of the most frightening experiences of my life. And no, I hadn’t taken pictures in the church! Our Tour Guide had forewarned us, fortunately.

You won’t find a picture of that church interior on the internet. I don’t believe that do inflict those indignities at Lowesby but you will find it has exactly the same number of interior shots on the web.. It is the most locked of locked churches, it seems. I intend to make a special request for access but in the meantime this page has only external shots.

For that reason, I am going to focus only on the Mooning Men Group sculptural activities here.

The church offers an almost exclusively Perpendicular look. Almost all of the windows are in that style. The chancel has a frieze on all three of its sides and battlemented parapets in the fancy double chamfered style we see at some of the other churches worked on by the MMG.  The west tower too is battlemented but in a more basic design. The rest of the parapets are plain. So we might have thought that the MMG were used only for the chancel. The north aisle, however, also has carvings in the style of “Lawrence of Leicester”. So the likelihood is that the MMG masons were involved in one of their stock-in-trade tasks of extending the aisle, re-profiling the roof and applying lead to it. Curiously, although the south aisle has identical parapets it has no cornice frieze. The same is true of the clerestory.

Images of Lawrence of Leicester’s north aisle frieze. Far Left: His personal trademark of a lion at the corner of the frieze, albeit lacking his usual “trident tail”. Second Left: The MMG collective  trademark of the mooning man. Third and Fourth: Two goffered caul headdresses. Far Right: A standard Lawrence of Leicester face.

The Gargoyle Master was here, leaving two of his little masterpieces on the north side of the chancel, on on the north aisle and just one of the south aisle showing that despite the absence of a cornice there the MMG were working on that side too. That gargoyle is an example of the Gargoyle Master’s iconic hitchhiker gargoyles that we see also at Tilton-on-the-Hill (less than two miles from here), Oakham, Owston, Wymondham and Empingham. We can reasonably assume, then, that the MMG did a full program of work here, including the erection of the clerestory.

Loweby’s  Gargoyle Master Collection. Top Left: The iconic and unforgettable “hitchhiker” gargoyle as seen at five other churches. Top Right and Right Centre: Two views of one of the GM’s most enigmatic creations. He carries what looks like a hammer on his left hand but what is in his right? It looks like a plaisterer’s trowel. Note the surviving black lead eyes on some of these sculptures.

The presence of Lawrence of Leicester is clear from his easily-recognisable, if limited style. His is the mooning man carving and we should note the absence of a flea carving, the trademark of John Oakham and Simon Cottesmore. That leaves Ralf of Ryhall as the prime candidate for the entirely different chancel frieze. There are three things that support that likely attribution.

Firstly, along with Ralf’s “home village” of Ryhall in Rutland Lowesby has the largest collection of surviving carvings with black lead eyes. Secondly, a label stop carving on the east window of the chancel closely matches one at Ryhall and is quite probably a portrait of the mason himself. Thirdly, several of the faces have the heavy “manes” of John’s work at Ryhall and, less certainly, at Cold Overton.

The Gargoyle Master’s presence is incontrovertible because of the Hitchhiker gargoyle. Of the other three, one also has surviving black lead eyes. There are two further badly weathered gargoyles on the south and north sides of them tower. They are face-pullers in MMG style but I see no evidence that they were carved by the MMG and the battlementing on the tower is different from that of the chancel. I suspect a hung jury!

The south chancel frieze by Ralf of Ryhall. Not as many black lead eyes have survived on this side as have on the east and north sides for some unaccountable reason. South sides usually fare better in England. The (lion?) face with exaggerated wrinkles is a them at Lowesby, repeated on the other sides of the chancel. There is a broken green mane (bottom left), a surprisingly regular feature of the MMG friezes.

The east end frieze. Friezes on the ends of chancels are not common within the MMG (and possibly unknown elsewhere) . They are found only at Ryhall., Lowesby and Tilton-on-the-Hill, all places where Ralf was the main sculptor. Another little confirmation, perhaps that he was the common factor at those churches. Again we see plenty of black eyes and those heavily striated grotesque faces that Ralf seemed to favour and which are particularly in evidence here. There are three pigs here too, the like of which Ralf did not carve elsewhere. A mystery.

Close-ups of some of Ralf’s images on the north and east sides of the chancel.

Lowesby label stops. Left: label stop with black eyes at Ryhall Church, Rutland. Second Left: An identical face with identical headdress, also with black eyes, at Lowesby. Is this Ralf of Ryhall himself? I think so. Second Right: Another human face - possibly semi-facetious? - at Lowesby with one surviving black eye. Far Right: Another tradesman’s face at Lowesby. Note the similarities in headdress. It is possible that this is not another mason, of course, but a carpenter or a plumber. We might speculate that the “Ralf of Ryhall” faces are not him at all, but of the contractor-mason. That is possible but these label stops do seem to coincide with the presence of Ralf. You might reasonably ask then if Ralf was himself the contractor mason. But then you would have to believe that he was also busy, amongst his many other activities, carving cornices. It really doesn’t add up. It would be more likely, in fact, that the figure on the right was the contractor-mason.

The Ralf of Ryhall label stop and that on the far right above are located on Lowesby’s east window, suggesting that the MMG replaced the windows in this church. As at so many of these MMG churches, a schedule of the work that was carried out implies a very hefty cost. At Lowesby they certainly built the clerestory, probably modified the aisles structurally, replaced a lot of windows in the church, leaded the roofs, built parapets including battlementing on the chancel, carved cornice friezes, installed gargoyles. This was an expensive program that probably cost £200,000+ in today’s terms.