St Andrew's Church, Billingborough

St Andrew's Church at Billingborough, seven miles south-east of Sleaford on the western edge of the Lincolnshire Fenlands, is a Grade I listed parish church famous above all for its spire — a slender, soaring octagon of 150 feet that the church historian Cox found "remarkable for the height of its slender spire", and Kelly's Directory for the "narrowness and height" of the tower "in proportion to the latter". Across the flat fen country it can be seen for miles, one of the signature steeples of south Lincolnshire.

A church stood at Billingborough in the eleventh century, noted in the Domesday Book of 1086. The present St Andrew's dates from 1251 by one account, 1312 by another, with additions continuing into the late fifteenth century and restorations in 1868 and 1891; the parish register dates from 1561. The church is built of ashlar-faced limestone and rubble, comprising chancel, nave, north and south aisles, tower with spire and south porch, in a blend of Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular styles.

The mid-fourteenth-century Decorated tower, recessed at the north-west of the church, is embattled with corner buttresses, a stair turret worked into its larger polygonal south-west buttress, clocks on its east and west faces, pointed-arch bell openings on all four sides and a pair of gargoyles on each side draining the roof. From its four corners, ornate crocketed pinnacles linked by slight flying buttresses spring to the great octagonal spire, which carries three tiers of lucarnes in alternating positions up its faces. The nave parapet is likewise embattled with corner pinnacles, above what Cox praised as "a fine set of clerestory windows... so close together that there is much more glass than stone" — eight fifteenth-century Perpendicular windows of three cusped lights each on north and south. The gabled south porch of about 1312 keeps stone benches along its sides, and the south door within retains fourteenth-century ironwork on its lock.

Inside, with seating for 375, the nave has early fourteenth-century arcades on quatrefoil piers — three bays on the north, four on the south — and the south aisle, contemporary with the porch, retains a piscina and locker at its east end. The chancel was rebuilt in 1891 (its predecessor had made do with a barn roof brought from Birthorpe), and in 1892 the east window was glazed in memory of the Duke of Clarence, Queen Victoria's grandson, who had died on 14 January that year. The east window also carries notable medieval heraldry: the arms of Eleanor, daughter of Henry, third Earl of Lancaster, of her husband John de Beaumont, second Baron Beaumont (died 1342), and of the Marmion family, while the south aisle east window preserves fragments of medieval glass including a haloed, yellow-robed figure. Further windows commemorate a Dr Blasson and Lieutenant C. R. Winckley, son of a former vicar, killed in action in the First World War; the west window received new glass in 1912 from Lieutenant Colonel Albert De Burton. Around the walls are marble monuments and plaques to eighteen people who died between 1719 and 1848, among them Robert Kelham (died 1752), for fifty years vicar of Billingborough with Threekingham and Walcot and village schoolmaster from 1704; the Revd Brownlow Toller (died 1794); and Thomas Buckberry (died 1828), whose charity of 1827 distributed bread to the poorest parishioners. Kelham's son, another Robert, who died aged 91 in 1808, became an author, antiquarian and Lincoln's Inn lawyer who produced an illustrated version of the Domesday Book and a dictionary of the Norman language.

The tower's bells have their own history: Henry Penn of Peterborough installed five in 1717, re-hung in a new wooden frame in 1846, and a treble was added in 1914 in a new steel frame by John Taylor and Co of Loughborough, making the present six. The Victorians re-roofed the nave in 1870 for £780, added new oak benches, a carved pulpit and repaved aisles in 1887, and contributed the reredos in 1894, its sides extended in 1913; the organ was restored in 1929 for £200. In 2011 fundraising was launched to make safe the timber supporting the bells, with repairs estimated at £4,000, alongside repairs to stained glass damaged by vandalism.

The line of clergy is recorded from John Jackson, parish priest from 1546 to 1577. In 1855 the living was a vicarage valued at £295 with 139 acres of glebe in the gift of Earl Fortescue; by the 1930s it had passed to the gift of the Crown. Listed Grade I in 1968 and within Billingborough's conservation area designated in 1997, St Andrew's became part of the Gilbertine Benefice of Lafford Deanery in 2010 — a name honouring St Gilbert of nearby Sempringham — linking it with the churches of Aslackby, Dowsby, Horbling and Pointon with Sempringham, in the Diocese of Lincoln.