Church Of St Margaret Of Antioch

Church of St Margaret of Antioch

An Anglican parish church of Perpendicular style, extensively restored between 1890 and 1892 by Knight and Chatters. The church comprises a nave and chancel constructed in random squared and dressed limestone, a tower in coursed squared and dressed limestone, and a south aisle in ashlar. The roofs are of red tile, with stone slate to the tower.

The nave is entered through projecting north and south porches and is dominated by a west tower with a chancel to the east. The north wall of the nave, largely rebuilt in 1890, features a rectangular three-light window with cinquefoil-headed lights, a moulded hood and carved head stops to the left of the porch, and a two-light pointed window with quatrefoil to the right. A gabled nineteenth-century timber porch with a dressed stone plinth stands on the north side, its pointed double plank doors enriched with carved spandrels and a decorative barge board. Trefoil-headed windows flank the doors on both the front and returns. The porch conceals an earlier pointed double plank doorway within what is possibly a fourteenth-century moulded surround, featuring a moulded and stopped hood.

The chancel is strengthened by diagonal buttresses on its north wall. This wall contains a two-light square-headed window with tracery and stopped hood. The chancel was largely rebuilt in the nineteenth century but retains what is probably an eighteenth-century two-light square-headed window with tracery and stopped hood on its east side. A nineteenth-century pointed priest's door with a moulded arch and hood with uncarved stops occupies the south wall, alongside a two-light stone-mullioned casement with stopped hood. The four-light east window displays nineteenth-century Perpendicular-style tracery.

Two two-light stone-mullioned casements appear on the south wall: one with double-quirked moulding, the other with hollow-moulded chamfers. The south aisle, dating to the fourteenth century, features buttresses with offsets. Its south wall contains two three-light windows with rectangular heads and hollow-moulded chamfers, and two further three-light windows of possibly fifteenth-century date, also with rectangular heads and hollow-moulded chamfers. The south door is a central double pointed eighteenth-century door with flush panels within a cavetto-moulded surround, set within an eighteenth-century gabled stone porch with a high Tudor-arched entrance. The greater part of a eleventh-century font bowl is housed within this porch. A pointed, probably fourteenth-century two-light window with quatrefoil occupies the east end of the south aisle, flanked by two eroded slatestone memorial tablets with partially legible inscriptions. The west end has a pointed, probably fourteenth-century two-light window with a cavetto-moulded surround.

The Perpendicular tower is in three stages with diagonal buttresses and a projecting nineteenth-century stair turret on its south-east side. The west face contains a plank door cutting across the base of a trefoil-headed window with carved cusps, spandrels and hood. A small lancet and clock face occupy the stage above; matching clock and lancet appear on the north side, with a single lancet on the south side of the same stage. The belfry stage has two-light windows with blind quatrefoils and fretworked shutters. A battlemented parapet with string course and gargoyles crowns the tower, above which sits a pyramidal roof with weathervane.

The interior of the church has been scraped and unpanelled. The nave is covered by a possibly eighteenth-century pointed wagon roof with plain stone corbels; the south aisle has a twentieth-century lean-to roof, and the chancel is covered with a twentieth-century panelled roof. A three-bay fourteenth-century nave arcade features double-chamfered pointed arches rising from octagonal piers. A similar chancel arch with plain responds stands between the nave and chancel. Shallow mutilated image niches with ogee-curved heads appear either side of the chancel arch, with a smaller similar niche in the splay of the window to the left of the pulpit and another mutilated niche with a built-in image above the south door. The tower arch is low and double-chamfered. Red tile flooring covers the floor.

The chancel contains a cinquefoil-headed piscina with credence shelf in its south wall, and a twentieth-century aumbrey opposite. Fragments of a twelfth-century scalloped capital and diaper decoration are preserved in the south chancel wall, with further diaper decoration fragments within the organ recess on the north. The church houses twentieth-century pews and choir stalls, and a nineteenth-century octagonal panelled pulpit.

A twelfth-century limestone font stands in the south aisle, comprising an octagonal bowl on a pedestal with engaged round corner shafts with hollow-moulded capitals. A fine long medieval chest with decorative wrought ironwork is also displayed in the south aisle.

Among the monuments are seven nineteenth-century ledgers in the south aisle. The chancel south wall displays a single pedimented white marble monument to the Reverend Henry Higford, who died in 1795. Fragments of early stained glass survive in one of the south chancel windows. The east window contains stained glass by Geoffrey Webb, dated 1928.