dern. The central
buttress is much shallower than the others and has a different
termination. The clearstorey displays three well-arched windows of three
lights (the innermost window a little smaller than the others) with
tracery not unlike that in the south aisle of the nave. The parapet is
probably old Decorated work that has been used again, for it has the
wide merlons and cruciform piercings characteristic of early
battlements, and the Perpendicular pinnacles, it will be noticed, are
not in the middle of the merlons. The manner in which the corner of the
tower has been reconstructed is extremely interesting. Up the angle
formed by choir and transept runs a sort of excrescence of masonry that
blossoms out, so to speak, into an extraordinary complication of
corbelling near the top, and is itself corbelled away at the bottom. In
this excrescence, as elsewhere, old materials have been used again, and
in the projecting mass, at the level of both triforium and clearstorey,
are the springings of arches curving eastwards and southwards, which
suggest that the adjoining walls had at first been intended to be on a
more advanced plane, and that the arches of the triforium were to have
been round in the transept (where, by the way, they are recessed) as
they are in the choir. This angle contains the tower staircase, which is
lighted by a little window in the upper corbelling and is reached from
the clearstorey gallery of the transept. On this side of the church the
parapet walk has to be carried round the corners of the tower on
squinches.

[Illustration: RECONSTRUCTED ANGLE OF THE GREAT TOWER, (SOUTH TRANSEPT
AND CHOIR.)]

=The Central Tower. South and East Sides.=--The south and east faces are
each divided by a central pilaster running up to the top of the parapet,
but otherwise the general scheme is not unlike that of the older sides,
save that the windows here are set higher in the wall. Each window has
two lights, wide and low, with much tracery above them, in which the
mullion branches into two sub-arches; and there are dripstones ending in
heads. The high weathering on these sides indicates that it was not in
the Perpendicular period that the roofs of the church were so
unfortunately lowered. At either end of each of these sides a buttress
rises to the base of the parapet in three stages, the second of which
has on the front a panel with an ogee crocketed hood and is crowned by a
gable with a grotesque at each cor