Church porch

The highly decorated two-storey porch of St Mary's, Yatton, England

A church porch is a room-like structure at a church's main entrance. A porch protects from the weather to some extent. Some porches have an outer door, others a simple gate, and in some cases the outer opening is not closed in any way.

The porch at St Wulfram's Church, Grantham, like many others of the period, has a room above the porch. It once provided lodging for the priest, but now houses the Francis Trigge Chained Library. Such a room is sometimes called a parvise which spelt as parvis normally means an open space or colonnade in front of a church entrance.

In Scandinavia and Germany the porch of a church is often called by names meaning weaponhouse. It used to be believed that visitors stored their weapons there because of a prohibition against carrying weapons into the sanctuary, or into houses in general; this is now considered apocryphal by most accepted sources, and the weaponhouse is considered more likely to have functioned as a guardroom or armoury to store weapons in case of need.

Examples

• 
  St Wulfram's Grantham, England: The church porch which houses the chained library
• 
  Church Porch with lattice gate, intended mainly to prevent birds nesting in the porch. St Guthlac, Little Ponton (England)
• 
  Billingshurst Church, England
• 
  Keutschach am See Church, Austria
• 
  Østerlars Church, Denmark
• 
  Porch of the Tolchkovo Church, Russia

See also

• Lychgate

External links

• Media related to Church porches at Wikimedia Commons