| A painting of
around 1802 by the drawing master Henry Jeayes, and pictures of 1878, show the bell tower with a
seventeenth or eighteenth century cladding of wooden planks, a balustrade and a small lead
roof. The Coventry Standard in 1856
sniffily described this as being 'in the tea-garden style'. The cladding probably
concealed a fifteenth-century half-timbered structure, which may have been supported by
the west wall and on the other three sides by arches in oak. A similar arrangement can
still be seen at Whitchurch in south Warwickshire. The Townley folio of watercolours of Warwickshire and Midlands churches (Birmingham Record Office) shows several churches with timbered bell turrets above the west end of the nave, at (as spelled) Bishops Itchington, Compton Murdak, Exhall, Honingham, Idlicote, Kinwarton, Milverton, Newbold Pacey, Norton Lindsay, Preston Bagot, Spernal, Wasperton, Whitchurch. Preedy's reconstruction provided a pair of wooden supporting arches inside the church, the eastern one in a modern, engineer-influenced style, the western one probably reproducing a fourteenth-century original and incorporating some of its timber. Below stood a font of the second half of the seventeenth century, when infant baptism was reintroduced to the church after the revolution. Preedy's tower was continued with an oak-shingled spire and a weathercock. |
 The tower today
|
