Church Of St Mary (Buckfast Abbey)

Church of St Mary at Buckfast Abbey

This is an abbey church built between 1907 and 1932 on the foundations of the medieval Cistercian abbey church, except for the east end. It was designed by F A Walters for Benedictine monks who established a house here in 1882. Most of the building work was carried out by a small group of monks working under a master mason. The church is constructed of snecked local grey limestone with Ham Hill dressings and has a copper roof. The style is described as a mixture of English Cistercian and French early Gothic. The east end Blessed Sacrament chapel was added in 1965 to designs by Paul Pearn.

The church has a complex plan comprising a nave with eight-bay lean-to aisles plus a galleried western bay, a central crossing tower, transepts with chapels, a three-bay choir with choir aisles, and an east end Blessed Sacrament chapel with undercroft.

The exterior west end features a nave with flanking projecting buttresses containing stairs to the gallery, rising as pinnacles with broach spire roofs. The bases and pinnacles are decorated with blind arcading. There is a round-headed west doorway with shafts, left and right shafts with cushion capitals and carved gable. The doorway has three orders of zigzag, billet and chevron moulding on engaged shafts and a two-leaf door with elaborate ironwork. Above the doorway is a recessed three-centred blind moulded arch containing two round-headed windows with shafts and a roundel window above. Blind arcading decorates the gable above the arch. The west ends of the lean-to aisles have smaller versions of the buttresses flanking the nave with paired round-headed openings (one blind) with roundels above.

The north side of the nine-bay nave has pilasters and a corbelled parapet. Round-headed triforium windows are linked by a string rising as a continuous hoodmould. The nave has a parapet and round-headed windows, with the hoodmould string interrupted by the pilasters. There is a small gabled porch in the second bay from the west with set-back buttresses, parapet and a round-headed outer doorway with shafts and chevron-carved arch. The easternmost two bays of the aisle have a taller roof and blind arcading above the windows. The north end of the north transept has tall paired arches containing four tiers of glazed blind and glazed windows, either round-headed or roundels. The east side of the transept has a one-bay chapel. The choir continues in the same style with lean-to choir aisle roofs. The 1965 concrete east end chapel stands on four columns with a shallow gabled roof.

The tower has three stages above the nave roof with clasping pilasters and corner pinnacles decorated with two tiers of blind arcading and broach spires, topped by a crow-stepped parapet. The lower stage has lancet windows in round-headed recesses, the middle stage has small lancet windows in moulded arched recesses and two-light plate-traceried louvred belfry windows.

The interior is stone-vaulted, with the aisles having transverse vaults. The arcades have piers with engaged shafts and chamfered and moulded arches. The nave rib vault has red sandstone infill. The triforium has a pair of two-light pointed arches to each bay with a super-ordinate round-headed blind arch. Aisle walls are decorated with blind round-headed recesses containing triple round-headed arches on shafts with moulded bases and carved capitals. A stone-vaulted west end gallery on piers has canted bays to the parapet. Tower arches rest on short paired shafts with moulded bases and carved capitals. The crossing has a corbelled stone gallery, and the transepts have simple galleries on moulded corbels with cast-iron railings.

The choir has similar detail to the nave but with carved rather than moulded capitals and stone infill to the vaulting of the choir and choir aisles. The east end of the sanctuary has two round-headed arches and two round-headed windows above the triforium with a central shaft rising to a carving of the Coronation of the Virgin.

The furnishings, floors, painted decoration and stained glass are unexpectedly lavish. The outstanding metalwork is mostly from 1928 to 1932 by Bernhard Witte of Aachen, inspired by German Romanesque metalwork. The stained glass is a remarkable collection, mostly still in the medievalising Victorian tradition and of the highest quality. The church also contains a 16th-century ivory crucifix donated by the Clifford family of Ugbrooke, the leading Roman Catholic family in Devon. The 1965 Blessed Sacrament chapel by Paul Pearn was conceived as a setting for ambitious mosaic stained glass designed by Father Charles Norris, one of the Buckfast Abbey monks.

The rebuilding of the abbey church by the Buckfast monks received significant publicity in national and local press. One of the monks with an interest in photography recorded much of the work, and this archive is held by the abbey. Buckfast Abbey became an important focus for Roman Catholicism in Devon in the late 19th and 20th centuries, with the monks serving private chapels in the area, including Ugbrooke in Chudleigh for the Clifford family and Dundridge in Harberton for the wife of Sir John Harvey.