Cottered

The church is principally from the 15th century with an 18th century spire, what forms a local landmark.  Opposite the main door is a large mural of St Christopher with a medieval background dating from around 1500. The Reverend Anthony Trollope, grandfather of the novelist of the same name, was a rector here.  The nave has large perpendicular style windows and a fine oak roof.  The font, erected in 1739, is made of Derbyshire marble.
 

There is a Queen Ann coat of arms and a memorial tablet to surgeon Sir James Cantlie, whose tomb is in the churchyard near the porch.  In the Lady Chapel are grave slabs to former lords of the manor of Broadfield and Cottered.  There is a carved windmill on the tower arch inside the church.  The west millennium window was installed in 2000 and depicts important stages of the spreading Christian message during the first two thousand years of Christianity.  The church was originally dedicated as St Mary's.


The wall painting of Christopher and the Christ Child at Cottered are now obscure and undistinguished, but the real interest here lies in the detailed landscape background. The painting is almost four meters wide, giving ample scope for fine detail of this kind.

Some details are, by this date, largely a matter of convention, such as the hermit at the left (detail, below left) with his hugely oversized lantern. As with most hermits in St. Christopher paintings, he is dressed in garments similar to those of a parish priest of the day.


Buildings surround him; his own hermitage, another timbered and gabled building with a large bell hanging in its entrance at an angle to the right behind it, and others dotted here and there in the implied distance. Beyond and above him in the painting is the curved parapet of a bridge, with a tiny figure on it, and more buildings, including what may be a large fortified manor house.
Below are trees of various kinds, a man with a fishing rod, walls or fences marking out fields, and, at the bottom left, a substantial castle.

Two churches with spires feature in this part of the surrounding scene, the lower one clearer, with a weathercock surmounting the spire. Just below this church, completely invisible except with magnification, and shown at the left below, is a walled garde

attached to a timbered building. In the garden, two men fight, apparently with swords (their size exaggerated, like the Hermit’s lantern and the giant weathercock). No hostility is necessarily implied here - this may simply be sword-and-buckler play with wooden weapons, a long-established activity frowned on as undignified by some aristocrats.