Church Of St Mary The Virgin

The Church of St Mary the Virgin is an Anglican parish church dating back to the 12th century, with significant additions and alterations in the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 18th centuries. It was restored in 1855 by G.E. Street. The church is constructed of rubble stone with dressed limestone, and has tiled roofs with coped verges and cross finials.

The building comprises a nave, a north chapel, a chancel, a west tower, and a north porch. The gabled north porch has a 19th-century double chamfered doorway and string course. The nave has a restored lancet window. The early 14th-century north chapel features a group of three cusped lancets dating from the 19th century, a reset Medieval grotesque mask above the west buttress, diagonal buttresses, and three stepped cusped lancets to the east. The chancel has a pair of 19th-century lancets to the north, diagonal buttresses, and stepped lancets to the east. The south side of the chancel has a two-light plate tracery window and a lean-to 19th-century vestry with a tile-hung south side and three stepped wooden lancets to the east, featuring cusped bargeboards. The south side of the nave incorporates a blocked three-bay arcade with plate tracery windows, and a double chamfered pointed doorway with a planked door and a rose window over the left-hand bay.

The three-stage west tower, built in 1750, has set-back buttresses, string courses, a 19th-century plate tracery window to the ground stage, an 18th-century semi-circular headed leaded window to the second stage, and a bellstage with quatrefoil pierced louvres, a clock face, a 19th-century battlemented parapet, and lead rainwater goods.

The interior features a fine 12th-century north doorway within the porch with attached shafts, scalloped capitals supporting a zig-zag rounded arch (partly restored), an inserted pointed moulded doorway, and a cusped image niche in the tympanum. Stone benches and a doorway lead to the chapel. The nave has a 19th-century four and a half-bay roof with cusped arch-braced collar trusses and curved windbracing. A 19th-century double chamfered tower arch is complemented by a good 1850s cast-iron spiral staircase with raised and pierced decoration. The Scudamore chapel contains a two-bay double chamfered arcade supported by a cylindrical pier with a moulded capital, alongside a braced collar rafter roof. It also houses two damaged effigies and a fragment of a carved Crucifixion recovered from the demolished Crucifix Cottages in Norridge. The chancel has a double chamfered arch and a three-bay cusped braced collar truss roof, with a polychrome tiled floor and fittings by Street: including sedilia, a piscina on the south wall, an organ case, choir stalls, a communion rail, an altar, and wall lights, along with C13-style rere-arches to the east window, containing glass from the 1850s. Other features include a wooden pulpit on a stone plinth by Street, a 12th-century cylindrical stone font with bands of lozenges and triangles, a Street cover, and good pews. Monuments in the chancel include a group dedicated to the Seaman family, a memorial to Lionel Archdeacon of Wells who died in 1760 by Reeves of Bath, two 17th-century tablets to William and Lionel Seaman, and a brass plate commemorating Elizabeth Hungerford who died in 1632. The Scudamore Chapel contains a group of 18th and early 19th century marble tablets dedicated to the Pearce family and one to John Barton, who died in 1783, also by Reeves of Bath.