Church Of St Martin

The Church of St Martin is an Anglican parish church dating back to the 13th century, with significant additions and alterations in the 15th century, and further restoration in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is constructed primarily from lias rubble, with Ham stone dressings, and has slate roofs with coped verges, cruciform finials, and a crested ridge to the chancel. The architectural style is predominantly Early English and Perpendicular.

The church comprises a nave, chancel, south aisle, south porch, and a west tower. The three-stage embattled west tower features corner pinnacles, gargoyles, diagonal buttresses with offsets, and a polygonal stair turret. It has 2-light bell chamber windows with tracery and stone grilles, 2- and 3-light ringing-chamber windows with tracery and stone grilles, and a large transomed 5-light west window with good tracery. The west doorway has an ogee arch within a moulded surround, decorated with leaf spandrels, and is fitted with paired studded plank doors. The nave has three bays with Perpendicular 3-light windows on the north side. The south aisle also has three bays and is characterised by traceried 3-light Perpendicular windows, except for a C19 reticulated tracery west window. The aisle is approached via a gabled, C19 porch. The chancel has two bays, with 2-light square headed windows and a priest’s door within a simple, chamfered surround. The east window is composed of three stepped cusped lancets, with earlier C13 lancets to the north.

Inside, the church has flagstone floors with good 18th-century memorials inset, and is plastered throughout. The nave and chancel have wagon roofs with ornamental ribs and bosses, while the aisle has a collar-and-tile beam roof with archbracing. Perpendicular moulded tower and chancel arches are present, along with a four-bay arcade to the aisle, featuring piers with similar moulding. The south aisle contains a piscina and the blocked remains of a niche’s former canopy. Upper and lower entrances to a rood stair are visible. The chancel includes cusped rere-arches. A Norman tub font with cable banding is also present, along with projecting stone corbels that once supported the rood loft. There is a restored Jacobean table, and good Victorian High Gothic furnishings including a pulpit and lectern. Late 19th-century altar rails and a good Edwardian altar table are also present, alongside painted canvas plaques depicting romanticised saints flanking the east window. Simple pine pews occupy the nave and aisle. Four good early 19th-century wall monuments are found within. A reset brass, originally from a 13th-century memorial, is set into the south wall; it commemorates Jane Walsh of 1565, though some work from the original medieval memorial remains on the rear. A small Gothick organ case stands in the aisle. Fragments of medieval stained glass remain in the chancel and aisle, alongside a richly coloured Edwardian east window and a good stained glass window in the aisle dating from 1930.