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Hidden Dorset > Discover > Heritage & Culture > Heritage > St Martin on the Walls Church, Wareham
St Martin on the Walls Church, Wareham
Wareham
St Martin on the Walls Church, Wareham Heritage
A small pre-conquest Saxon Church famous for housing the priceless effigy of Lawrence of Arabia carved by Eric Kennington in 1935.
St Martin's, as it now stands, represents the most complete example of a Saxon church in Dorset. Aspects showing its Saxon origin include a tall, narrow nave and chancel, late Saxon wall-arcading in the North West Isle and traces of a Saxon door.
The building has been adapted and enlarged but the nave and a tiny window in the north side of the chancel are original to the church's construction in around 1030.
The walls of St Martin's are covered with fragmented frescoes: 12th century figured ones in the chancel, black letter inscriptions of the 16th or 17th centuries and even a bond memorial inscription of about 1800.
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