hink the north buttress
has been rebuilt, and without the string. The south buttress is
complete up to two weatherings, and has two strings round it. It
is a picturesque and valuable ruin, and well worth a visit. It is
amusing to notice that Creswell now calls itself a rectory, and an
open-air service is held annually within its walls. It was a
pre-bend of S. Mary's, Stafford, and previously a Free Chapel, the
advowson belonging to the Lord of the Manor; and it was sometimes
supplied with preachers from Ranton Priory. Of the story of its
destruction I can discover nothing. It is now carefully preserved
and, I have heard it suggested that it might some day be rebuilt
to meet the spiritual needs of its neighbourhood.

"We pass now to the most stately and beautiful object in this
neighbourhood. I mean the tower of Ranton Priory Church. It is
always known here as Ranton Abbey. But it has no right to the
title. It was an off-shoot of Haughmond Abbey, near Shrewsbury,
and was a Priory of Black Canons, founded _temp._ Henry II. The
church has disappeared entirely, with the exception of a bit of
the south-west walling of the nave and a Norman doorway in it.
This may have connected the church with the domestic buildings. In
Cough's Collection in the Bodleian, dated 1731, there is a sketch
of the church. What is shown there is a simple parallelogram, with
the usual high walls, in Transition-Norman style, with flat
pilaster buttresses, two strings running round the walls, the
upper one forming the dripstones of lancet windows, a corbel-table
supporting the eaves-course, and a north-east priest's door. But
whatever the church may have been (and the sketch represents it as
being of severe simplicity), some one built on to it a west tower
of great magnificence. It is of early Perpendicular date,
practically uninjured, the pinnacles only being absent, though,
happily, the stumps of these remain. Its proportion appears to me
to be absolutely perfect, and its detail so good that I think you
would have to travel far to find its rival. There is a very
interesting point to notice in the beautiful west doorway. It will
be seen that the masonry of the lower parts of its jambs is quite
different from that of the upper parts, and there can, I think, be
no doubt that these lower stones have been re-used from a
thirteenth-century doorway of some other part of the building