St Lucia

About

St Lucia's is the Grade II listed Anglican parish church of Dembleby, a small, dispersed village in the North Kesteven district of Lincolnshire, about 8 miles east of Grantham and 5 miles south of Sleaford. It sits within the Church of England parish of South Lafford, in the Diocese of Lincoln.

The church is dedicated to St Lucia (St Lucy), one of only two churches in England to bear this dedication. It is a small, single-cell building with a nave and an apsidal chancel, built in the Romanesque Revival style — a deliberate echo of the Norman church it replaced.

History

Dembleby appears in the Domesday Book of 1086, when a holding in the village was held as sokeland of Folkingham by Gilbert de Ghent. The original church here dated from the Norman period, though no church is explicitly mentioned in the 1086 survey.

By the mid-19th century that medieval building had fallen into disrepair, and in 1867 it was taken down. A new church was built on a better site nearby to a Norman Revival design by Charles Kirk of Sleaford, using rock-faced limestone, some quarried locally, with a wood interior. The new building was consecrated in January 1868 and seated around 60 people.

Rather than lose the old church's medieval character entirely, its Norman chancel arch and vestry archway were carefully removed and re-erected in the new building, along with a fine pillar piscina, or "holy water stoup." The 12th-century font was likewise carried over. A bellcote holding two bells cast by J. Warner and Sons in 1867 completes the church.

The site of the original medieval church, around 400m northwest of today's building, survives as buried earthworks and is a scheduled ancient monument in its own right, preserving evidence of the church and its churchyard burials from the medieval period onward.

St Lucia's was designated a Grade II listed building on 1 February 1967. Its surviving Anglican parish registers date back to 1553.