Church Heritage Record 628035

West tower and spire; nave with north aisle and south porch; chancel with north organ chamber and vestry.

The present church is by Henry Woodyer (1816-1896); it was built in 1870.

The design is typical of Woodyer's interpretation of the Early English style, provided with his variant of sharply pointed lancet windows. The tower is of three stages undistinguished externally; the lowest has diagonal buttresses, and a doorway in the west wall with a small lancet above. The ringing chamber is lit solely by a small rectangular light in the north wall and the belfry, which is slightly set back, has paired bell-openings each with a quatrefoil in plate tracery above the main lights. The spire is quite plain and solidly proportioned with one series of lucarnes in the cardinal faces; it is crowned with a gilded weathercock. Access to the ringing chamber is by a small staircase turret in the angle of the south tower wall with the west wall of the nave.

The first bay of the south nave wall is taken up by the porch, which stands at the head of the path leading from the churchyard gate. The outer arch is chamfered, the chanfers continuing to the ground. The inner arch, which takes the form of big cusping within the other, is carried on shafts attached to the points of the responds. Three lancets within deep reveals pierce the side walls, and the inner doorway has two orders of roll-mouldings and an oak door provided with clegant scroll decoration to the hinges. The remaining bays of the south nave wall have windows each with identical Y tracery with a roundel in the spandrel, and at the south east corner is a substantial buttress.

The chancel has three lancets unequally spaced on the south wall, the larger interval being taken up by a buttress; at the base of the wall is a simple plinth and a stringcourse forms the sill to the windows, stepping up at the east to form the higher sill of the window in the east wall. This consists of three stepped lancets of exceedingly sharply pointed character, each separated from the other by thin buttresses on plate tracery rather than by shafts. 

The north wall is almost entirely obscured by the tiny vestry under a pent roof and the taller cross-gabled organ chamber to the west; the former has a smal lancet in the cast wall and a doorway in the north, the latter with two lancets and the sacred monogram IHS executed in Gothic lettering carved in relief in the point of the gable. The north aisle is under one sweep of roof with the nave, there being no clerestory and the only distinction between the two being a slight change of pitch. The aisle wall is pierced by single lancets under a continuous blank arcade (another favourite idion of Woodyer's) and several rainwater heads are dated 1869.

The hard grey stone used to face the exterior is also used for detailing within the building, complementing the pale buff of the plastered walls. The west tower arch has three chamferedorders dying into the responds at each side, and is quite small and narrow in scale, the whole building indeed not being large. The three south windows stand within plain reveals with chanfered rore-arches and the north arcade, of four bays, has octagonal piers without capitals. Instead the sides towards the arches swell out at this point so that the mouldings continue up and round the arches without a break, a most odd feature. They are completed by an outer moulding supported on pointed corbels in place of capitals. The aisle itself is lit by small single lancets to each bay.

The chancel arch, crossed by a timber screen, is plain with keeled mouldings an and an inner order on corbels carved as the heads of a king and a bishop. On the south wall are four niches with trefoiled heads, the form of the trefoil continuing back to the outer wall with unusual effect. Three of the niches are trefoil-headed lancet windows and the fourth (the second from the east) forms a sedilia, of exaggerated proportions since although the arch is in line with the others, the seat is of course much lower than the sills of the windows; this corresponds with the buttress on the outer face of the wall. The eastern window has a piscina set in the sill. On the north side is an arch opening to the organ chamber, fillod with a row of organ pipes, and the three lancets which form the east window are set within an arcade on shafts of polished marble, the arches of typical sharply pointed trefoiled pattern.

Almost all of the stained glass is by Morris and Co.