Betjeman’s Best British Churches. Richard Surman

Peter’s is a fine cruciform church, nearly all 14th-century (and therefore unusual in Devon) in the former park of the earls of Bath, with a good Georgian rectory some way off. Those who like church monuments will be rewarded at Tawstock – it has a splendid collection, mainly of the earls and countesses of Bath, their connections and household officers. In the N. transept is a ceiling of Italian plasterwork, medieval glass, a beautiful 16th-century gallery, a Renaissance manorial pew of the earls of Bath, carved bench-ends and monuments. In the S. transept are a similar ceiling and monuments. In the S. chancel aisle is a fine open roof, c. 1540, Burman’s figure of Rachel, Countess of Bath, 1680, and the tomb of Lady Fitzwarren, 1589, which carries a most beautiful effigy.

      TEIGNMOUTH † St James

      15m/24km S. of Exeter

       OS SX939730 GPS 50.5480N, 3.4983W

      Except for its 13th-century sandstone W. tower, the church was rebuilt c. 1821 by W. E. Rolfe, a pupil of Soane. Octagonal in shape, it has a delightful light and airy interior with slender clustered cast-iron piers supporting a lantern.

      TIVERTON † St George

      12m/19km N. of Exeter

       OS SS954124 GPS 50.9021N, 3.4885W

      The best Georgian church in Devon, by John James, 1714–30, its symmetrical yellow sandstone exterior has rusticated quoins. Inside are Ionic columns, galleries and panelling.

      TORBRYAN † Holy Trinity

      4m/6km S. W. of Newton Abbot

      OS SX819668 GPS 50.4894N, 3.6650W

      Churches Conservation Trust

      An imposing Perpendicular exterior gives no hint of what bursts upon the eye on pushing open the door – the most completely characteristic Devon interior in plan, fittings, colour and atmosphere. The first impression is of uninterrupted light from the large windows of clear glass, whitened walls and ceilings, and the white Beer-stone arcades. Then against this background is the vivid colouring of the rood screen, pulpit and altar, nearly all 15th-century, though the altar is actually made up from the original pulpit. 18th-century box pews encase earlier benches and have brass candle-holders, all very charming.

      TORQUAY † St John the Evangelist

      Montpellier Road

      OS SX918636 GPS 50.4627N, 3.5246W

      Torquay’s magnificent high church, by G. E. Street, 1861–71, dominates the harbour. There is extensive use of Devon marble, a rare total immersion font, mosaic panels by Burne-Jones and Salviati, and Morris glass.

      UPTON HELLIONS † St Mary the Virgin

      2m/3km N. of Crediton

       OS SS842033 GPS 50.8176N, 3.6449W

      This unsophisticated country church is set in deep country, though not far from Exeter. Plastered and whitewashed walls, always a good start for a country church, support 15th-century wagon roofs; there are some carved benches of the same date. The pulpit is Georgian and a country-made monument commemorates a country squire and his wife.

      UPTON PYNE † Church of Our Lady

      3m/4km N. of Exeter

       OS SX910977 GPS 50.7687N, 3.5468W

      In a setting near cottages, the church is built of ‘trap’, a local volcanic stone. The 14th-century W. tower is unusually decorated with figures of the four evangelists, set in niches above the buttresses. Inside, set into the S. wall, are two canopied 16th-century tombs of the Larder family. The attractive interior was restored in 1867–8.

      WEST OGWELL † Dedication unknown

      4m/6km W. of Newton Abbot

       OS SX818700 GPS 50.5183N, 3.6677W

      Churches Conservation Trust

      This delightful little church stands in a park, an unaltered early 14th-century cruciform building with a late-Georgian interior. The plastered and whitened walls, clear glass, box pews, altar rails and Jacobean pulpit are all very appealing.

      WIDECOMBE-IN-THE-MOOR

      † St Pancras

      5m/8km N.W. of Ashburton

      OS SX718767 GPS 50.5768N, 3.8108W

      A fine granite church in the heart of Dartmoor, it is best seen in winter against the austere lines of the moorland above. It is essentially early 14th-century cruciform; the original transepts enlarged into aisles in the late 15th century or early 16th. This was a common development in the larger Devon churches, which are not as purely Perpendicular as they seem. Widecombe has a noble tower – granite at its most graceful, and odd for such a remote village – probably built by prosperous tinners. The surviving dado of the rood screen has 32 figure-paintings. In the W. end is a small village museum.

      SHERBORNE: ST MARY – exquisitely detailed fan vaulting above the choir

DORSET

      This is a county of small churches and enormous scenery. Its long extent of shadowy coast, so varied and dramatic, is in most places too steep or too strange – one thinks of the sixteen miles of pebbles called the Chesil Beach from Portland to Bridport – to admit many colonies of hideous holiday bungalows. Only at three places, the Poole-Bournemouth conurbation, Weymouth, still with remains of Georgian dignity, and Swanage is there very much ‘development’. This beautiful little county divides itself into three kinds of scenery, for long described as Felix, Petraea and Deserta, and the ghost of that immortal fatalist, Thomas Hardy, haunts all three. More recently the National Grid and the Army and other Government departments have done their best to lay his ghost and kill the remoteness.

      Felix is the clay vales of the west and north-west, with Beaminster, Bridport and Sherborne as their chief towns, all in rich farming country abounding in oaks, a land of rivers and stone manor houses and butter pastures and, in the Blackmore Vale, of hunting people.

      Petraea is the chalk downs and rocky formations of Purbeck and Portland. The chalk comes in from Wiltshire and crosses the county diagonally from north-west to Lyme Regis in the south-west. The hills are higher and steeper than those of Wiltshire, and topped by a marvellous series of earthworks, including Maiden Castle, with its two miles of ramparts, one of the biggest pre-historic earthworks in the world. From the chalk heights you may often see the English Channel on one side and the azure blue of the rich vales inland. The red-brick 18th-century town of Blandford Forum and the white limestone county town of Dorchester are in the chalk. The Isle of Purbeck, with Wareham at its gate and Swanage on its coast and Corfe Castle in the middle, is a hilly diversity of geological formations which makes the crumbling cliffs, with their boulder-strewn shores, strange indeed. Purbeck marble, such as supplied columns for Westminster Abbey, the Temple Church, London, Salisbury Cathedral, and many a medieval font and effigy, may be seen at Durlston Head near Swanage. The loveliest part of the island of Purbeck is cut off by the military. The Isle of Portland, with its own tall, fair-haired people a separate race from the mainland, is a block of limestone nearly four miles long and with hardly any trees. Here was quarried the white stone Wren used for St Paul’s Cathedral and many of his churches. It is quarried today.