A Somerset church will tell you its age and its parish history if you ask it in the right order. Most people walk in, glance at the altar, and leave. The evidence is elsewhere: in the buttresses outside, the carvings inside the porch, the worn oak at the end of a bench, and the timber overhead.

You need three things. An hour, a torch, and the habit of looking up. Add a pair of binoculars if you want to read carved detail without climbing on furniture.

Start Outside: The Tower Dates the Building

Somerset's reputation rests on its towers. The classic county tower is a fifteenth-century Perpendicular affair: tall, slender, built in clearly marked stages, with angled or set-back buttresses running the full height rather than stopping short. Look for a stair turret, often on the north side or tucked into an angle, and for the string courses that divide one stage from the next.

The top is where the money went. Some towers finish with plain battlements; others carry a pierced parapet, a corbel table of carved heads, or a crown of crocketed pinnacles. Chewton Mendip, Evercreech, Ilminster, Huish Episcopi and St Cuthbert's at Wells are all worth studying for the way the parapet is handled. Compare the belfry windows too — louvred openings, usually two lights to a stage.

Earlier towers look different. Norman work is lower, often unbuttressed, with small round-headed openings and a heaviness that reads as weight rather than height. If the tower sits over the middle of the church instead of at the west end, the plan has been altered at some point, and the change is usually visible inside where the arches meet.

The Porch: Where You Should Linger

Most Somerset porches are fifteenth-century, and many have two storeys. The room above — the parvise — was used for storage, meetings, and occasionally as a priest's lodging. It is reached by a small stair, and the doorway to it is often still visible from the nave.

Linger here. The outer arch carries the best carving on the building: mouldings, capitals, sometimes a hood mould ending in carved heads. Step inside and look for a stoup, a small basin set into the wall for holy water. Look for consecration crosses cut into the plaster. Then examine the inner door: medieval ironwork, strap hinges, a sanctuary knocker, sometimes a carved tympanum above.

Benches along the porch walls are not modern additions. The porch was where marriage and burial parties waited, where business was done, and where the church ale was sometimes brewed and sold. It was the parish's outer room, and it still is — the noticeboard inside tells you more about the living village than the nave does.

Bench Ends: The Parish's Own Archive

Late medieval Somerset was rich on wool and cloth, and that money went into naves, roofs, screens and benches. The bench end is the vertical board finishing each row, usually topped with a carved poppy head. Between about 1480 and 1540, local carvers filled them with an extraordinary range of subjects:

• Symbols of the Passion — nails, pincers, hammer, dice, the crown of thorns, the five wounds.
• Saints and bishops, sometimes with the instrument of their martyrdom beside them.
• Beasts and hybrids — foxes, hounds, hares, owls, dragons, and the foliate face usually called the Green Man.
• Working life — a man with a cart, a woman with a spindle, a plough, a ship under sail.
• Marks of ownership — merchant marks, guild badges, initials and dates, which are as close as most parishes get to a donor list.

Brent Knoll and Crowcombe hold celebrated sets, and Halse and Trull reward a slow walk down the nave. Raking light is everything: a low sun through a south window will show carving that flat midday light hides. Be warned that many benches were reset or copied in the nineteenth century, so a crisp Victorian angel may stand beside a worn Tudor fox. Oak darkens and polishes with handling, which is one clue; tool marks are another.

Looking Up and Looking Through

Somerset's wagon roofs are the county's other great timber achievement. Curved principals spring from the wall plate, joined by carved ribs and bosses, with angels or saints ranged along the cornice. Traces of original colour survive on some, particularly in the panels between the ribs.

Then find the rood screen, the carved wooden partition that once divided nave from chancel. Most survive only in their lower sections. The staircase that once led to the loft above is often still there — a narrow doorway set high in the wall, sometimes with a worn newel.

Small openings matter too. A hagioscope, or squint, is a low window cut beside the chancel arch so that someone in a side aisle could see the altar. On the walls, faded painting appears where you least expect it, frequently on the north side above the arcade.

Do not overlook the font, often the oldest object in the building. Norman fonts are square or round with scalloped bowls or beakhead ornament, and their lead lining carries centuries of graffiti.

Stone, Tracery and Setting

Building stone tells you where you are. Ham stone from near Montacute gives south Somerset its golden colour. Doulting stone, quarried near Shepton Mallet, is paler and greyer. Blue lias gives north Somerset churches their thin, striped courses. Dundry stone travelled from the Bristol area. Most parishes used the nearest good quarry, which is why the county changes tone as you drive.

Window tracery is a quick dating tool. Small round-headed openings suggest Norman work. Tall narrow lancets belong to the thirteenth century. Flowing, curving tracery is Decorated, roughly 1250 to 1350. Large windows filled with vertical mullions and flat-headed lights are Perpendicular, and in Somerset that usually means fifteenth or early sixteenth century.

Where the church stands matters as much as what it is made of. A circular churchyard, a boundary bank, a preaching cross or a group of yews all point to a site in use long before the present building.

A Practical Day of Church-Hunting

1. Walk the churchyard boundary first and view the tower from all four sides.
2. Study the porch carvings before you open the inner door.
3. Sit down inside for two minutes. Let your eyes adjust before you look up.
4. Carry a torch for dark corners and binoculars for roof bosses.
5. Work one feature at a time: tower, porch, font, screen, bench ends, roof.
6. Buy or borrow the parish guidebook. It usually names the donors and the dates.
7. If the door is locked, check the noticeboard for a keyholder. Many rural churches are open daily; some only in summer.
8. Never touch carved wood, brasses or wall painting. Skin oils and pressure do permanent damage.
9. Leave a donation and sign the visitors' book. Both are read.

A notebook beats a camera here. Write down the date, the tower's parapet, two bench-end subjects, and one thing you could not identify. Come back in a different season and the light will answer at least one of them.

Photo: ELG21 / Pixabay