St. Peter and St. Paul’s Church, Gosberton.
On either side of the doorway into the church there is a tall, narrow recess in the wall. These are called niches and would have at one time housed statues. You can see at the bottom of each niche a plinth, on which a statue would have stood. The attention to detail is interesting. Each niche has an intricately carved roof-like canopy and a faux-vaulted ceiling.
What’s that ghostly shape?
Both of these niches were at one time painted, and remnants of red paint can still be seen – especially the one on the right, where you can make out the ghost-like image of a figure. The reasonable assumption is that the statues which one stood in these niches were cemented in place, meaning that part of the background behind the statues couldn’t be accessed to paint, so that these unpainted areas were revealed when the statues were eventually removed.
Who were the statues representing?
We don’t know is the simple answer. It is a fair bet that they could have been Saints – perhaps St. Peter on one side and St. Paul on the other; the two Saints to whom the church is dedicated?
Why were the statues removed?
Again, we don’t know for sure. During the Reformation in the 16th century, the papal authority of the Catholic Church was challenged, giving rise to Protestantism and the creation of the Church of England. Religious reform was the justification for the destruction of shrines and removal of statues, as the veneration of saints was considered to be one of the ideological transgressions of the old regime. It also provided an excuse to strip religious buildings of their greatest riches.
Or there may be a simpler explanation; that over time the statues became damaged or badly worn, and were removed.
