This semicircular object is mounted on a wall in the small parish church of Winstone in Gloucestershire. Below it is a memorial to a seventeenth-century London printer named John Haviland, who was born in Winstone, a son of the rector, and died in 1638. The memorial was apparently removed from its original position during Victorian renovations, and put in its present place in the twentieth century. The wooden thing is carefully positioned rather like a halo above the ingenious and judicious printer’s epitaph. But I doubt if it came from a printing house – it doesn’t look like part of either a common press or a rolling press. Windmill machinery might be a possibility.

In fact (update to this post after the not-at-all obscure explanation eventually dawned on me) the halo came from above. To be precise, the bell chamber in the tower – it’s part of the wheel to which the bell-rope is attached. Five can be seen in the photo below by Ray Whitehouse of the bells in Angmering church, West Sussex, which were first installed in 1783, a few years after Winstone’s newest bells were cast. Winstone’s oldest was cast c. 1320. Campanologists can find more about Angmering’s bells  here.