Click for the home page

 

 

 

 

the  ROMANESQUE  SCULPTURE 

OF THE cloister

 

The stones from two sides of the cloister appear to have been taken by boat down to Borough Marsh near Shiplake  after the dissolution. Many have been recovered from there and are held in reading Museum and published by the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland on their website www.crsbi.ac.uk. The story is told in :-

Baxter R 'The Decoration of the Cloister at Reading Abbey' (with Stuart Harrison), in Keen, Lawrence and Eileen Scarff (eds.) Windsor: Medieval Archaeology, Art and Architecture in the Thames Valley, Transactions of the British Archaeological Association, XXV (2002), 302-12.   

 

Above is one of the voussoir stones making the arch  with a beakhead decoration. It looks a little strange as it was photographed upside down resting on a shelf but shown here as it would have appeared in the arch. Copyright Reading Museum Service (Reading Borough Council). All rights reserved. 

Another voussoir has the image of a bearded man. Copyright Reading Museum Service (Reading Borough Council). All rights reserved. 

Click to return to Discovering Reading Abbey