Pilton, Tithe Barn c.1955

Photo ref: P383014

More about this scene

To reach our final village, Pilton, we must leave our straight route at East Pennard and travel almost due north for a couple of miles or so. Pilton is a large but quite dispersed village beside the Glastonbury to Shepton Mallet road, and we are now some six miles from the former. The parish church, dedicated to St John the Baptist, developed from the Norman period onward through the Middle Ages, and is down in a dip at the junction of several streets. The church has an attractive Norman south door, with corbels with heads of a bish- op and two angels inside the porch. Inside there is an Easter sepulchre, and the nave and north aisle have Somerset-style timber tie-beam roofs with carvings of angels. Next to the church there is the manor house. It was established in the 13th century as a residence of the Abbots of Glastonbury and added to by them for the next couple of hundred years. After the Dissolution, it passed into private hands and what we see today from the outside is the result of various alterations made during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, including some by one of the Earls of Hereford who owned the place in the 17th century. In the yard at the back there is a rare survival, a dovecote dating from the 13th or 14th century.