Jewellery
Jewellery (British English) or jewelry (American English) consists of small decorative items worn for personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, pendants, bracelets, and cufflinks. Jewellery may be attached to the body or the clothes. From a western perspective, the term is restricted to durable ornaments, excluding flowers for example. For many centuries metal, often combined with gemstones, has been the normal material for jewellery, but other materials such as shells and other plant materials may be used. It is one of the oldest type of archaeological artefact – with 100,000-year-old beads made from "Nassarius" shells thought to be the oldest known jewellery. The basic forms of jewellery vary between cultures but are often extremely long-lived; in European cultures the most common forms of jewellery listed above have persisted since ancient times, while other forms such as adornments for the nose or ankle, important in other cultures, are much less common.
St Andrew's Church, Chew Stoke
The oldest bell in the tower dates from 1698 and was cast by the Bilbie family who were bell founders and clockmakers based initially in the village. The Bilbie family produced more than 1,350 bells, which are hung in churches all over the West Country. Supplies of the tin and copper used to make bell metal were probably obtained from brass foundries in Kelston and Bristol. The metal was melted in a wood-burning furnace to over and then poured into a mould made from loam, or foundry mud, from the River Chew. Others in St Andrew's are from the same maker are dated 1718 and 1731. The bells were tuned and re-hung into a new frame in 1908 and again in 1996 with a new bell from John Taylor's foundry in Loughborough replacing the treble. The redundant bell is now on display at the back of the church as a memorial to the Bilbies.
The Victorian square font and pulpit match, but are now largely whitewashed, as is much of the rest of the church. Just inside the porch, on the left of the church door, is a stone figure holding an anchor which was moved to the church from Walley Court with the flooding of Chew Valley Lake. There is an unconfirmed story that this was given to the Gilbert family, then living at the court by Queen Elizabeth I. It is possible that it was originally from the site of a nunnery within the parish which was closed with the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536.