Newcastle-on-Tyne.
_Trumpington Church._--On the north side of the tower of Trumpington
Church, Cambridgeshire, there is a curious recess in the basement story,
which I have not met with anywhere else, or seen fully accounted for. It
is sufficiently capacious for a man to stand in, having an arched
entrance six feet in height, with a turning to the westward of about two
feet, and is formed completely within the thickness of the wall. The
village tradition, that it was formerly used as a confessional, founded
on the existence of an opening into the interior part of the tower, now
blocked up, has long been disesteemed. In the volume by the Cambridge
Camden Society, on the Churches in Cambridgeshire, it is said to have
been made for an ecclesiastic to stand in, to ring the Sanctus bell. A
round hole, lined with wood, in the roof of the niche, evidently
intended for a bell-rope, and chafings upon the upper part of the little
aperture, such as the friction of one would produce, are very convincive
of its having been used for _some such_ purpose. But when we consider
that the Sanctus bell, except when a hand one, was "suspended on the
outside of the church, in a small turret over the archway leading from
the nave into the chancel,"[5] the probability that it was made for the
purpose above-mentioned seems very much weakened. I shall feel obliged
for a reference to any other instance, or a more satisfactory
explanation.
[Footnote 5: Glossary of Architecture.]