These two identical slabs form the southern impost of the grand twelfth-century chancel arch. Both have the same single chamfer, which returns along the east and west faces of the impost. The upright surfaces are ornamented with a very well-preserved plait, which certainly reveals a knowledge of late Anglo-Scandinavian interlace forms. This decoration turns along the west face of the impost and probably also did so, in mirror image, along the east face on the second stone, though damage to that face makes this uncertain.

However, the opinion has repeatedly been expressed that the southern impost of the late Romanesque chancel arch at Carlton is a re-set fragment from an earlier cross-shaft. This view can be traced back at least as far as an article in the parish magazine for September 1901 when the rector wrote: 'The supports of the great chancel arch are Norman, though the southern one was rebuilt in 1892. Its capital is thought to have been made from an old cross, part perhaps of one which marked a preaching station before a church was built' (Stapleton 1903, 13).

Appendix C item (lost stones for which no illustration has survived).

The chancel arch at Carlton has paired engaged shafts with scalloped capitals; its northern impost is ornamented with pellets. Keyser (1907, 236) took the interlacing pattern on the southern impost to be straightforwardly contemporary ornamentation of the Romanesque chancel arch. The facts that the impost is made up of two identical slabs (just like its companion to the north) and that the chamfer and decoration turn along the return faces support that assessment. In regarding the visible carving as work of the Norman period though undertaken in an Anglo-Saxon idiom, Taylor and Taylor do not really propose anything different (1965, i, 151). Theirs is the formulation repeated by Pevsner and Williamson (1979, 92–3). Quite clearly, the mere presence of interlace does not automatically imply an Anglo-Saxon date. There is similar interlace decorating imposts at Kirkstall Abbey (Yorkshire West Riding), for example, where it was undoubtedly carved in the second quarter of the twelfth century, although the suggestion that the interlace on the north impost block of the chancel arch at Ledsham (Yorkshire West Riding) is of similar date is more controversial and closely debated (Coatsworth 2008, 197–8 with bibliography).

But for the evidence of re-construction of this part of the arch and the possibility of contemporary observations that might suggest otherwise, then, Keyser's seems a correct view. If the proposition that this is a re-cycled pre-Conquest monument was based on the visible decoration, it is simply wrong and the product of uninformed local wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it is possible that the rector saw the stone when the impost was rebuilt in 1892, and that his confident opinion was based on his having seen that other faces of the stones, now built in, are decorated. The slab-like configuration of the stones perhaps makes this less likely, unless they represent a splitting of an early monument. Giving due credit to the incumbent's reported opinion, and presuming that it is based on more than the present visible carving, however, we recommend that the opportunity to look behind the exposed face should be taken in order to settle the matter, should that occasion ever arise.