St Mary'S Church

St Mary's Church, High Offley

Parish church of the 12th to 15th centuries with 19th-century restoration.

MATERIALS AND PLAN

The church is built of local freestone and rubble sandstone with tile roofs. It comprises a nave with a slightly lower chancel, a south aisle under a separate roof, a west tower, and a south-west porch.

EXTERIOR

The three-stage tower has an early 13th-century lower stage with clasping buttresses and 15th-century upper stages with a rustic-looking embattled parapet with pinnacles. The west face contains a tall round-headed window of 19th-century date, and small second-stage windows in the south and west walls below north and south clock faces. The belfry openings are 2-lights under square heads.

The unbuttressed chancel contains a restored 3-light 14th-century east window with reticulated tracery, a 3-light late Perpendicular window and a blocked doorway in the north wall.

The nave, which has full-height buttresses, contains a 3-light window similar to the chancel and a 2-light square-headed window with cusped lights, both restored. A tall round-headed chamfered doorway at the west end is probably 19th-century.

The south aisle, which extends the full length of the nave and chancel, has buttresses with offsets and a circa 1300 3-light east window of uncusped lights. In the west wall, the roof line of a former lean-to structure against the tower is visible above a round-headed window. Three 19th-century south cross windows with lozenge intersections are present. The south-west porch has pilaster buttresses and a double-chamfered entrance.

INTERIOR

There is no chancel arch, and the junction of nave and chancel is marked by a change in the roofs. The finely detailed and well-preserved probably late 14th-century cradle roof of the nave features small bosses of grotesque heads and foliage with moulded braces with carved feet. A later beam across the west end of the nave, dated 1726, was probably associated with an 18th-century ceiling, now removed. The chancel has a cambered tie-beam roof with moulded ribs, probably of 15th-century date, and its 2-tier wall plate is carved with intersecting arches.

The pointed tower arch is double-chamfered on polygonal responds. The 13th-century 5-bay south arcade has round piers with moulded capitals and stepped round-headed arches with single chamfer. The eastern respond is carved with heads and volutes. The south aisle trussed-rafter roof is 19th-century, plastered above collar and behind rafters.

Walls are unplastered, revealing a blocked round-headed doorway and window in the nave north wall, and blocked round-headed windows either side of the east window, all of 12th-century date. Floors are plain tiles, with parquet floors below pews.

FIXTURES AND FITTINGS

Fixtures are mainly 19th and 20th centuries in date. The octagonal font of 1887 has a floriated cross on one facet. The timber pulpit with large fielded panels is 20th-century, as is the carved timber reredos of 1910. Nave benches have square-panelled ends.

Several 18th and 19th-century wall monuments are present, including one to Gerrard Skrymsher (died 1700) with Tuscan pilasters and broken pediment, and one to James Skrymsher (died 1724) with pilasters and achievement. The three north windows have mid-20th-century glass by Morris & Company, one dated 1949.

HISTORY

Evidence of blocked windows and doorways visible inside the church reveals a 12th-century core to the nave and chancel, which also had a west tower by the 13th century. The aisle was added in the 13th century, with the round arches used elsewhere in the district at that period, for example at Adbaston. Fenestration of the nave and chancel is late Perpendicular of 15th-16th century date, as are the upper stages of the tower and the nave and chancel roofs. 19th-century restoration was low-key, except for alterations to the south aisle, and the subsequent addition of a porch.