Church Of St Martin

The Church of St Martin is a Grade II* listed building constructed in 1714 for Joshua Allen, with an 1874 baptistery designed by W.H. Brakspear and a tower added in 1887 by George Truefitt for Sir Williams Cunliffe Brooks. The church features a combination of ashlar and timber framing, topped with graduated slate and clay tile roofs. It has a wide nave that includes a west gallery, a south porch, a north baptistery, and a chancel with an adjoining tower and vestry to the south, along with an organ chamber to the north.

The nave consists of four bays, with the porch, largely built in 1887, located in the first bay and styled to match the tower. The other bays are adorned with three-light chamfered mullion windows featuring semi-circular heads, reflecting a 17th-century design. The tower is bold and square, with a projecting plinth, three low-level casement windows, a datestone, and a timber-framed clock stage that has open panels. It is topped with a clock face and gables on each side that have moulded barge boards, culminating in an elaborate weather-vane. The east and west windows contain four and five lights with intersecting tracery. The octagonal baptistery has a pyramidal roof and is designed in a more conventional post-Puginian Victorian Gothic style.

On the south wall, there is a series of headstones dating back to 1644. Inside, the chancel is panelled with box pew ends and features a double hammer beam roof with convex curved wind braces, likely from 1714. There is a 16th-century octagonal font incorrectly inscribed with the date 1304, set on a 20th-century shaft, and a studded batten door from a former church, which probably dates to 1304. The site has been home to a church since 850 AD and was previously a Saxon burial ground.