Church of St Peter

The Church of St Peter is a parish church consisting of a three-bay nave, a shorter, narrower two-bay chancel, a north vestry, and a south porch. It was built using local rubble masonry with freestone dressings, and has a rough stone plinth along the west wall. The roof is slate-covered with stone copings, which are clad in lead. A bellcote with a cross finial sits atop the west gable, and a similar finial is on the east gable of the nave and on the porch. The north vestry has a large shouldered stack topped with a pointed capping.

The entrance is through a timber-framed porch with a slate roof, set on stone plinths. The inner doorway has a shallow elliptical head formed from rough stone voussoirs, and the boarded door has ornate hinges. A slate slab above the doorway, possibly reset from an earlier building on the site, bears an engraved inscription. Late 19th-century windows are found throughout. The east window has paired trefoil-headed lights set within a pointed arched frame containing a quatrefoil. The west gable has a similarly detailed single window. The north vestry has a doorway in the east wall and a leaded light in the west wall, both with stepped flat heads to their arched openings.

Inside the church, the roof timbers are exposed. The chancel roof has three bays, incorporating one scissor-braced truss and one arch-braced collared truss, the latter being cusped above the collar and supported by wallposts down to chamfered corbels. Single purlins have cusped windbraces. The nave roof has six bays with pegged and chamfered braced collared trusses and paired purlins, with the two bays closest to the chancel having windbraces. The walls have been stripped of render. The chancel arch is a flat pointed arch built from slabs of local stone. Pointed-headed recesses in the east and north walls of the chancel originally housed water stoups and aumbreys.

The late 19th-century east window depicts the Crucifixion, the Laying in the tomb, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, serving as a memorial to Berkley Smith. A window in the south chancel wall features St Michael and is dedicated to Samuel Pope, who died in 1901, and Anne Pope, whose window depicts The Good Shepherd and Job holding a child. The west window depicts Christ with St Peter and is a memorial to Charles Ansell, who died in 1881, and his wife Louisa, who died in 1885.

Several bronze memorial tablets to members of the Poole family, dating from 1594 to 1783, are set into the south wall of the chancel. A slate tablet on the south wall of the nave commemorates Anthony Pool of Newton, Montgomery, second son of Reverend Anthony Poole of Cae Nest, who died in 1791. Other memorials within the church are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The church’s fittings are also from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including an octagonal sandstone font at the west end of the nave.