St James Church, Cameley
During my annual holiday in Somerset in May 2022, I visited St James Church in Cameley – about 5 miles from my home village of Timsbury and on the edge of the Mendips. It has an impressive fifteenth-century tower built of red Mendip sandstone with a handsome parapet and the rest of the church built from the humbler local blue lias limestone. Inside are the wall paintings from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. It as medieval benches as well as Georgian pews, an early 17th-century pulpit, a west gallery dating from 1711, and a south gallery from 1819 inscribed in handsome lettering ‘for the free use of the inhabitants’. Along the walls of the nave are rows of eighteenth-century hat pegs for gentlemen to hang their hats.
