St Andrew
Hambleton, Rutland
The hilltop setting of St Andrew's ensured its preservation when much of its parish disappeared beneath Rutland Water in the 1970s.
The Noel family monuments are among the highlights of an exceptional collection of memorials in the fine secluded medieval church.
There is work here by sculptors who were the foremost of their age, including a rare sculpture in marble by the 17th century master woodcarver Grinling Gibbons (one of the few funerary monuments he carved in stone). This monument, to Viscount Campden, cost £1000 when it was completed in 1686, a fortune, at the time. But as the Viscount had four wives and 19 children, all represented and named on this huge and lavishly ornamented marble monument, perhaps the sum was not excessive.
Two of the later Noel monuments are by Joseph Nollekens, a very successful 18th century sculptor who was a cofounder of the Royal Academy in 1768. An earlier memorial, quite different again, with its figures in exquisitely detailed costumes, is the alabaster tomb of 1580 commemorating lawyer Robert Kelway and his family.
Pevsner wrote of Exton: There are no churches in Rutland and few in England in which English sculpture from the 16th to the 18th centuries can be studied so profitably and enjoyed so much as at Exton.