Parish Church Of St Margaret Of Antioch

Parish Church of St Margaret of Antioch

This is a parish church built in 1856–58 at a cost of £1673 by H.I. Stevens, an architect from Derby (1806–73) who designed many churches across the East Midlands. The church was constructed in simple Decorated style using coursed, rock-faced sandstone with a graded slate roof. It replaced an earlier church on the site, from which an 18th-century monument and a fragment of medieval stained glass were salvaged and reused.

The building comprises a nave with a lower and narrower chancel, a south tower, and a north vestry. The tower is set back from the west end of the nave, with its lower stage forming a porch. The tower has three stages with diagonal buttresses and a broach spire with lucarnes. The south doorway features a single order of shafts with foliage capitals and a cusped arch with relief foliage in the cusps. The middle stage contains small pointed quatrefoils beneath clock faces (added in 1920), while the upper stage has attached corner shafts and two-light bell openings with louvres.

The nave windows comprise single-light windows either side of the tower and two two-light windows further right, all with quatrefoil tracery lights. Two-light east and west windows also have quatrefoil tracery lights. The north side features three two-light windows, and the west wall has two single-light windows below a cusped circle, all spanned by a relieving arch. The chancel has diagonal buttresses, a three-light east window with intersecting tracery, two two-light south windows, and a trefoil-headed south doorway. The vestry has a pair of cusped east windows.

Internally, the nave contains a five-bay hammerbeam roof on brackets with pierced trefoils above and below the beams. The chancel arch has two orders of chamfer, the inner corbelled on shafts. The chancel has a canted boarded ceiling painted blue and a two-bay north arcade with double-chamfered arches and an octagonal central pier. One arch is filled by the organ and the other by a wooden screen with Gothic glazing. The walls are plastered and the floors paved with stone, including an 18th-century memorial slab near the font, with raised wood floors beneath the pews.

The principal fixtures include benches with square ends and moulded tops. The octagonal font is of Chellaston marble. The pulpit, choir stalls, and communion rail are 20th-century additions all decorated with linenfold panelling. An 18th-century marble tablet commemorates Edward Newcomen (died 1722) and his wife Ann (died 1727). A fragment of medieval stained glass in a chancel south window is said to represent St Margaret of Antioch. Other windows include a depiction of St Margaret in the west window (1890) and a crucifixion in the east window (1920). A tablet in the vestry commemorates the opening of the church.

The church is prominently sited within the village and forms a strong architectural group with the adjacent St Margaret's Church of England Primary School and Schoolhouse.