Church Of St Mary

Church of St Mary

A small rural Anglican church in an isolated position in farmland, with origins dating to the 12th century. The building shows dateable evidence predominantly from the 15th and 16th centuries, including the 14th-century south doorway. The structure is rendered pudding stone with freestone and handmade brick dressings. The bell tower is timber-framed with a shingled spire, and the roofs are red tiled. The plan comprises a chancel, nave with an internal west end bell tower, south porch, north-east vestry under a catslide roof, and a north-west lean-to kitchen and toilet block added in 1990. The church underwent reseating in 1888.

Exterior

The chancel features handmade brick diagonal buttresses and a good 3-light 16th-century east window of red brick with uncusped lights. On the south side are two 2-light Tudor-arched brick windows with uncusped lights. A priest's doorway is framed with renewed stone and a label records that it was blocked in 1959. The nave has diagonal west end handmade brick buttresses. The west wall has been rebuilt in red brick but preserves a 2-light 14th-century window with reticulated tracery. The south side has one square-headed 3-light Perpendicular style traceried window. The north side has one round-headed and one lancet window. The bell tower projects through the west end of the nave on a square-on-plan weatherboarded base, topped with a shingled broach spire. The south porch is flint with red brick quoins and a round-headed red brick outer doorway. It contains a medieval common rafter roof with straight diagonal braces from collar to rafter and a longitudinal tie below the collars. The 14th-century inner doorway has mass dials on the jambs and a late medieval door of overlapping planks incorporating two square iron grilles.

Interior

The walls are painted and plastered. The timber chancel arch is formed from timber-braces to a tie beam with timber traceried spandrels. These braces date to approximately the 15th century but do not appear in an 1820 watercolour of the church. The tympanum above the tie beam is infilled with old vertical planks. The tie beam has three scars on the front, possibly associated with rood figures. The nave contains one tie beam and crown post truss with arched braces to the tie beams supported on mutilated carved stone angels. The crown post has 4-way bracing and a moulded base, with the roof plastered over the rafters. The chancel has an open roof with a crown post truss but with traceried spandrels to the braces, which spring from timber corbels. The tower is an impressive structure, probably dating to the 15th century and positioned at the west end, featuring corner posts, posts flanking the west window, tie beams and arched braces. The north and south sides of the structure consist of doubled scissor bracing, with two braces cut through for a later repair. The doorway from chancel to vestry has a medieval plank and cover strip door. A trefoil-headed piscina, probably 19th century, is located in the south wall. Medieval painted decoration survives on the south side of the chancel arch. The sanctuary features choir stalls with simple shouldered ends and timber arcaded sanctuary rails, probably dating to the 1880s. The reredos is a textile hung below a gilded traceried canopy, while the pulpit is timber and polygonal on short shafts, designed in the same style as the sanctuary rails, with trefoil-headed openings on shafts with capitals. The font dates to the 15th or 16th century and features a deep octagonal stone bowl on an octagonal stem. The 19th-century nave benches have convex shouldered ends and small sunk panels carved with quatrefoils. A west end gallery was added in the 1880s. Numerous floor slabs, mostly dating to the 18th century, some with brasses, include one commemorating Ann Bull, aged 3, who died 'of that merciless distemper the small-pox'. Wall monuments of various dates include an elegant bronze wall monument on a marble slab to 2nd Lieutenant Harold Jervis Johnson, d.1916, signed by F Ransom. Flemish stained glass is leaded into one of the north lancets, and two chancel windows are by Clayton and Bell.

An 1820s watercolour of the interior and a 1907 photograph are kept within the church.