Church Of St John The Baptist

The Church of St John the Baptist is an Anglican parish church built between 1878 and 1881 by William Butterfield. It is constructed of squared rubble stone with ashlar dressings and a stone slate roof. The church is relatively small, featuring a west tower, a nave, a south porch, and a chancel. The windows are arranged as groups of narrow, cusped lancets, with a flush ashlar sill course and some flush banding between the lights. The narrow west tower has a two-light window above a small slate quatrefoil and a low, louvred timber bell-stage capped with oak shingles and an iron cross finial. The nave’s south side includes a bargeboard stone porch with heavy timbering, a pointed entry with pierced quatrefoils in the spandrels, and a moulded pointed doorway with a door featuring fine iron hinges. The porch roof is of an unusual design. To the right of the porch are two pairs of lancets with slate quatrefoils above, a buttress, a pair of lancets, and a triplet of lancets. The north side has two pairs of lancets, a buttress between, and a lean-to outhouse to the left. The chancel has three small lancets on the south side, a pointed three-light east window with a hoodmould and low flat angle buttresses, and a gabled organ chamber with a lean-to vestry to the left.

The interior remains unaltered from Butterfield's original design, featuring a continuous four-sided panelled roof with a crenellated wall-plate, the panels subdivided further over the chancel. There is extensive tiling in red, black, slate-blue, and patterned encaustic tiles, with a tiled dado to the walls of the nave. A fine full-height timber screen incorporates a cinquefoil-cusped central arch and lower two-light sides with sharply pointed arches, all with flat quatrefoil-pierced tops. To the right is a canted-fronted timber pulpit and a fine timber lectern. The chancel features similar wall tiling and inset tile lines dividing the upper wall. A stone reredos includes inset tiles and two-arch arcading on each side with marble shafts. A south-side seat recess features an encaustic tile roundel, and a pierced timber altar rail is present. The church contains a good east window with stained glass dating to approximately the 1850s, originally from Bremhill Church. On the north side is the organ and a shouldered doorway to the vestry, which contains a piscina at its east end.