Church of St Mary

The Church of St Mary is a building of group value, dating from the roughly-dressed and coursed rubblestone construction with ashlar dressings layered over time. It features a nave, a north aisle and vestry, a south porch, a west tower, and a longer, lower chancel, all covered by a Welsh slate roof.

The south porch has a gabled stone tiled roof of an altered pitch, with coped verges and a moulded round-arched outer doorway featuring a hood mould and plinth courses. An inner pointed arched doorway has weathered mouldings, with renewed stone and wood benches, a coved ceiling renewed in the 1980s, and a niche above the door. The nave’s roof displays raised coped verges with an apex cross and swept eaves, with a former higher roof line visible on the east face of the tower. The south window has two trefoil-headed lights with a rectangular hood mould. The chancel has swept eaves, a small, roughly trefoil-headed south lancet, a pointed chamfered arched priest’s door, and a three-light east window with geometrical tracery, along with mostly diagonal buttresses with offsets. The north aisle contains trefoil-headed lights. The west tower is distinguished by its embattled parapet, four corner pinnacles with crockets, a plain corbel table with drainage shoots, a string course, shallow diagonal buttresses with offsets, and an attached stairtower to the south with a conical roof. This tower also possesses small rectangular lights to the north and south, two-light trefoil-headed louvres to the ringing chamber, a two-light trefoil-headed west window with quatrefoil tracery under a hood mould, a four-centred moulded arched doorway with a narrow keystone inscribed “WL” above, and a shallow diagonal buttress with one offset.

The church was reroofed and refurbished in 1903. A segmental, pointed chancel arch is unmoulded but chamfered, with run-out stops. An unusual west-facing curved stone staircase leads to a former roodloft through a chamfered archway, which has been remodelled. The stairs now begin 2 metres from the ground. Beside the south door, a small, chamfered ogee arched niche is situated above a partly destroyed stoup, with a further square niche containing a 20th-century door. The high tower arch is only moulded or chamfered at the arch level, with a four-centred arched doorway adjacent providing access to the tower stairs. The chancel now features an unusual north door, and all chancel openings have unrendered dressings and wide splayed reveals.

The chancel contains wall monuments from 1783 and 1834. Possible traces of wallpainting are present over the chancel and west arch, along with indications of coloured limewash, and medieval plaster might survive under later dense rendering. Grey painted stone commandment tables with black painted non-incised lettering, reset in the tower wall, are now barely legible. Some doors may incorporate old metal fittings. A single bell and bellframe are present, though not visible. A Norman font features a round bowl on a thick stem, slightly splayed at the base below a moulded string. The chancel floor is of stone flags. There is also some stained glass and leaded diamond quarries within iron frames.