All Hallows Church Of Saint Kea

All Hallows Church of Saint Kea is a parish church built in 1894 to a design by C.H. Fellowes Prynne. It was commissioned by donors John Claude Daubez and William Lovey Hearle, and constructed by local builder A Carkeek. The church replaced a plain rectangular church of 1802 designed by James Wyatt.

The building is constructed of shale rubble walls with dressed granite quoins, copings, jambstones, mullions and arches. It has steep red tile roofs with coped gable ends to the nave, chancel, organ aisle and north transept, with outshuts at lower pitch over the aisles. A hip roof covers the north of the vestry, and a gable end the south porch. The north porch and tower feature embattled parapets, the tower crowned with a copper spire.

The plan comprises a nave and chancel under one roof, a west tower, north and south aisles, a north transept with chancel vestry in the angle, a north porch in the angle between transept and vestry, a south organ projection at the east end of the south aisle, and a south porch towards the west end. A stone lateral chimney over the side wall of the chancel serves the vestry. The style is Late Perpendicular with Arts and Crafts influence.

The three-stage west tower has a moulded plinth and weathered diagonal corner buttresses to the top of the second stage. A moulded cornice supports an embattled parapet surmounted by a broach spire. The moulded four-centred west doorway features a label with carved stops and quatrefoils to the spandrels. Above this is a Perpendicular three-light window with transom dividing the tracery, topped with a label with carved stops. The upper stage has two round-headed louvered and traceried openings to each side within a recessed panel with machicolated cornice. An octagonal stair turret on the north wall, in the angle between tower and north aisle, rises to the top of the second stage and is roofed in granite.

The remaining windows throughout are of more conventional Perpendicular style. The west windows to both the north and south aisles flanking the tower each have two lights with tracery and labels with stops. All walls have plinths. The north wall of the north aisle contains five flat-headed traceried windows: a wider three-light window in the middle with buttresses separating it from paired two-light windows left and right. The north transept has a north gable end with two flat-headed two-light cusped windows, adjoining a four-centred doorway to the porch on the left with carved stops to the label. The vestry set back to the left is lit by a flat-headed window with cusped lights, with a door and window to the basement beneath.

The chancel has a window to the north wall left of the chimney. The east gable end has diagonal corner buttresses and a further buttress incorporating an inscribed foundation stone below a five-light window with wheel tracery to the rose. The south wall of the chancel has a single-light window with tracery, and further single-light windows with tracery appear in the gable end of the south organ projection to the far left and right. Two windows light the south wall, and a projecting chapel to the right has three windows.

The south porch is in Arts and Crafts style with stone walls on a plinth to sill level and a timber frame structure over. Coloured leaded cusped lights appear between studs serving as mullions both to the side walls and flanking the doorway. A two-light window in the gable over features stylized trailing vine carving to the barge board. The south aisle windows, a two-light one to the left and a three-light one to the right with a buttress between, are flat-headed with cusped lights. The organ projection has diagonal corner buttresses and a buttress between windows two and three from the left. All its windows have two lights with tracery over within arched openings with stopped labels.

The interior is little altered. The walls are of polychrome dressed stone brought to course. Limestone arcades of three bays between nave and aisle feature four-centred moulded arches enriched with four-leaf and other carved details over octagonal piers. A polychrome chancel arch on corbels, each with three shafts, is accompanied by two further arches to the aisles from the choir. The original pine roof structure comprises widely spaced arch-braced trusses.

The east window depicts saints including some of Christ's apostles and Cornish saints including Saint Kea and King Arthur. A memorial window in the north commemorates those fallen in the First World War, featuring an armoured angel in one light and an armoured soldier in another light dedicated to Lieutenant Arthur Donald Sowell, who died on 24 August 1916 in the Battle of the Somme.

The fittings include a Norman freestone Bodmin type font with a round bowl on four shafts and carving to four faces of the bowl, featuring a flared cross to the east, a lion-like animal to the west, and a young tree of life to the north and an older one to the south. A nowy-headed painted letter of thanks to Royalist supporters in Cornwall from Charles II, transcribed by George Withiell in 1686, is also present. Both the font and letter were transferred from the former church of Saint Kea at Old Kea. Other fittings are mostly of the nineteenth century, with the exception of carved oak bench ends to the choir, said to be by prisoners-of-war around 1914.

The building is set in unspoilt wooded surroundings with a graveyard containing many nineteenth-century graves.