How to Spot Different Types of Church Spire

Why Spires Are Worth a Second Look

A spire is one of the few parts of a parish church designed to be read from a distance. Long before you can make out a porch, a font or a chancel arch, the tower and its spire are telling you something about when the church was built, what stone was to hand and which local workshop was in fashion. Once you know the four common forms — broach, needle, crown and recessed — you can stand in a churchyard and start placing a building within a century or so, purely from its silhouette. It is one of the most rewarding skills in British church-crawling, and it costs nothing but a pair of eyes and a willingness to look up.

Broach Spires: the Corners Give Them Away

The broach spire is the great workhorse of the English parish church, and the easiest to identify once you know where to look. A broach is simply a sloping triangular face of stone that fills each corner where a square tower meets an octagonal spire. Instead of a parapet or a flat platform, the tower's four corners are covered by these broaches, so the spire appears to grow straight out of the tower with no visible break.

• Look at the base: if you can see four diagonal slopes sweeping inward from the corners, it is a broach.
• Region: abundant in Lincolnshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Nottinghamshire, Northamptonshire and south Yorkshire.
• Date: mostly thirteenth and fourteenth century, often modest in height and somewhat stout.
• Details: lucarnes — the small dormer-like openings in the spire's base — may be plain or richly carved.

Broach spires rarely soar. They sit low and broad, and many carry small pinnacles at the corners of the broaches themselves. If the transition from tower to spire feels solid and continuous rather than staged, you are almost certainly in the East Midlands.

Needle Spires: Slim, Steep and Often Lead-Clad

A needle spire is all verticality. It is very tall, very slender and very steep, often sitting on a tower that is itself narrow, and it frequently has a single small lucarne or none at all. Many are timber frames covered in lead, copper or slate, which is precisely why so many have been rebuilt after lightning strikes and gales.

• Region: Shropshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire, the Marches and parts of Somerset and Wiltshire.
• Date: typically fourteenth to fifteenth century, though a great many were restored or rebuilt in the Victorian period.
• Look for: a plain or embattled parapet with the spire rising from within it, and a weathervane at the apex.

Geography often explains the form. Where good building stone was scarce or costly to haul, a light leaded spire over a stone tower made economic sense. A spire can be both needle-like and recessed, so treat the two categories as overlapping rather than exclusive.

Crown Spires: Buttresses That Curve Like Ribs

The crown spire is the rarest and most spectacular of the four. Flying buttresses rise from the corners of the tower and curve inward to meet the central spire, leaving open daylight between them. The effect is of a stone cage or an inverted crown resting on the tower. Newcastle and Edinburgh each possess a celebrated example, and both date from the fifteenth century.

• The test: a broach is a solid mass, whereas a crown is an open framework you can see through.
• Region: largely Scotland, with a handful of English examples in the north.
• Date: fifteenth century, usually on towers with large, richly traceried belfry openings.

Crown spires demand a tower of unusual strength, since the buttresses push outward as much as they support. If you see one at all, you are looking at a piece of structural bravado.

Recessed Spires: Set Back Behind the Battlements

A recessed spire rises from inside the parapet rather than from its outer edge, so the tower top continues as a parapet, often embattled or pierced, with the spire visibly set back. Between the two there is usually a gutter and a walkway, and a shadow line you can spot from the ground.

• Diagnostic: corner pinnacles stand clear of the spire, sometimes with tiny spirelets of their own.
• Region: especially East Anglia, Somerset and the West Country, plus much late medieval work elsewhere.
• Date: chiefly fifteenth century, in the Perpendicular style.

This arrangement allows for elaborate parapets, flushwork, carved niches and statues of saints, and it gives the tower a strongly horizontal finish before the spire takes over.

Reading a Spire on the Ground

Stand well back — a hundred metres or more — and look at three things in turn: the base, the silhouette and the surface. The base tells you broach, crown or recessed. The silhouette separates a stout fourteenth-century spire from a soaring leaded needle. The surface tells you whether you are looking at stone, lead, copper, slate or shingles, and a patch of pale lichen or bright verdigris can reveal a later repair.

Then look at the tower beneath. Broad buttresses, thick walls and small belfry windows suggest an earlier date; huge traceried openings, flushwork panels and slender pinnacles point to the fifteenth century. A pair of binoculars turns a pleasant walk into a proper survey. Record what you see — county, form, material, and your best guess at a date — and within a season you will find that the skyline of every town you visit has begun to speak to you.