Soham, Cambridgeshire
As part of an ongoing programme of restoration work to the roof of St Andrew’s Church, Soham, Cambs, ASC recorded the various architectural elements making up this late medieval hammer-beam roof. Fortunately the mid 17th-century iconoclast William Dowsing failed to visit Soham, and thus spared the church the destruction of its religious carvings. As a result the entire range of its medieval decorative carving is still represented, even if later damage or decay has left it incomplete. With the exception of the cornices, the original decorative scheme is exactly the same as at St Andrew’s Church, Isleham, and was probably built by the same school of craftsmen.
The roof originally spanned the area of the nave that had been heightened to form a clerestory. Shortly afterwards, when the tower was complete or nearly complete, the roof was extended by one bay within the tower/nave junction. The tower had certainly been completed by 1552, when an inventory records the presence of bells in the steeple.
The first major repair programme to the church was occasioned in 1603 because the windows had been removed, allowing birds and the weather to get in. The extent of this repair work is apparent in the amount of ironwork in the timbers. All the hammer beams have forelock bolts, and all the tie beams have been spliced and tied with iron straps.
The roofs were leaded by 1746, and some repairs were carried out in the 19th and 20th centuries. The sarking boards (boards above the rafters) appear to be fairly new and some have bead moulding, a characteristic of early 19th-century boards.
