Dorset Gothic

I spent a lovely couple of days in Dorset at the start of this week. Since reading the book Nightmares in the Sky I have become morbidly sensitive to gargoyles, these strange beings that inhabit a world above our heads. Near where my sister lives in Wimborne is this house, which someone has chosen to decorate with a variety of corbel-stop heads - ten of them, to either side of each window. I say 'chosen', because a couple of faces repeat themselves and I imagine they've been bought out of a catalogue of some kind:


There's nothing fake about the gruesome cow-skull carved on the doorframe, however.


Meanwhile, in all my years of visiting Wimborne Minster, I've never noticed this floriate skull:


While I've also managed to avoid the Congregational Chapel in the town, which seems uniquely grim and threatening:


Cerne Abbas Church has a crop of absolutely demented gargoyles, and a very pleasing Gothic chair:


St Osmund's church at Evershot boasts gargoyles which are equally as unhappy as Cerne Abbas's (especially the one which has lost its head but gained a wasps' nest), but one of the houses in the village has a much more benign one: