Parish Church (dedication unknown), Borley (EHER 8542)

Medieval church, possibly partly Anglo-Saxon. Some Roman work can be seen. The chancel and west tower are late 15th Century. The dedication is unknown.

Monument description derived from merging EHER 8542 and 28483. Original HER entry merged with NRHE data import: Church. <1> Late 15th century chancel and west tower. Nave is problematical. Two blocked windows can be detected through the plaster in the south wall. Some Roman can been seen. It is not unreasonable to suppose that Burley is at least partly an Anglo-Saxon church albeit undatable. <2> Architectural description. <3> The only observed feature in an electrical cable trench from the main road to the tower was the mortared foundations of the church tower comprising large flint rubble blocks set in a soft lime mortar. <4> Church (dedication unknown). Nave may be 11th century. <5> August 2016. Dendrochronological investigation. The scope of this scientific dating programme has been restricted by the limited accessibility of timbers for sampling. No samples could be obtained from the chancel roof, and the selection of timbers sampled from the nave roof was severely restricted. Sapwood disintegrated on most cores, with the result that most samples retained limited numbers of sapwood rings, and all therefore had less than 65 rings. Only two timbers cross-matched, but none could be dated by ring-width dendrochronology. The results of the radiocarbon wiggle-matching of one of the pair of cross-matching timbers, however, demonstrates that at least two of the timbers from the nave roof were felled in 1464–1485 cal AD (95% probability; borl0306 felling; Fig 6 (upper)), which is in accordance with fifteenth-century date of both the nave and chancel roofs expected on typological grounds. Although only two timbers have been dated by the analysis, these appear to be representative of the nave roof and suggest that the surviving fabric is largely medieval in date. Should further access to these roofs become available in the future, additional sampling for dendrochronology from a wider range of timbers in these roofs would be merited. <6> See also: <7>