Parish Church Of St Mary

The parish church of St Mary is an Anglican church dating from the 12th century, with significant additions and alterations in the 14th and 16th centuries, and a substantial restoration in 1875. The church is constructed of rubble with squared quoins, and has slate and clay tile roofs with raised, coped verges. It comprises a nave, a south porch, a central tower, and a chancel.

The three-bay nave has heavy, weathered buttresses. The west window is of neo-Norman design, featuring recessed colonnettes with scallop capitals and outer scallopped corbels that carry a decorated dripmould. Similar windows (without inner orders) are present on the north and south sides. The nave has a slate pitched roof with a plain gable. The gabled south porch has a clay tile roof and an arch-head opening leading to a 12th-century doorway. The inner arch features paired chevrons forming lozenges, colonnettes with scallop capitals, a chevron frieze, and a drip decorated with a Greek key design.

The central tower is of two stages. The lower stage has dressed stone corners, single square lights at ground and belfry levels, and a north-east stair turret with a circular light and a lean-to roof. The upper stage has a plain parapet above a string course carried on decorative corbels, which are mainly grotesque. There are single lights below the parapet.

The gabled chancel has rubble in diagonal courses. It has a neo-Norman west window with two round-headed lights, colonnettes with scallop capitals, and a small central oculus in an arched recess. The restored north and south windows, and the south priest’s door, are also present.

Inside the nave, a wagon roof of perpendicular style, dating from 1536, features alternating large and small bosses along the spine and an embattled wallplate. One nave window has a cusped rear arch. The central tower has two restored arches mirroring the motifs of the south door, with colonnettes; the nave arch is twisted, while the chancel arch is plain. Above these arches are paired chevrons forming lozenges topped with a Greek key design. The groin vaulted tower is supported by four heavy ribs resting on grotesque, dragon-like corbels. The chancel's north and south windows have trefoil cusped rear arches.

A 12th-century font, square in shape and decorated with crosses and chevrons on three sides, stands on a plain circular capital atop a plinth. Further furnishings include a neo-Norman pulpit, a timber communion table, a 1950 reredos, and a 1978 boiler screen with fine carved timber detail. A tablet by T. King of Bath commemorates Anne Gore (1793). The tower’s south window contains medieval fragments. The nave’s south window depicts the Madonna and Child and was made by William Morris and Co.