Church of St Margaret

St Margaret’s Church stands in the quiet village of Hemingford Abbots in the East of England. A church has occupied the site since at least 1086, when it appears in the Domesday Record. Parts of the present building date from around 1300, though older traces remain. The nave arches and flying buttresses recall a central tower that once rose above the crossing. Twelfth-century pillars mark where that tower stood, and the roof still shows signs of an earlier, lower pitch. Inside, twenty-two carved angels watch over the congregation from the fifteenth-century oak roof. The glass tells a story of many centuries. Most of the stained windows are Victorian, yet the north aisle holds eighteenth-century heraldic panels and fragments from the Middle Ages. A modern glass screen by David Peace, later enlarged with a Dove engraving by Sally Scott, fills the tower arch in memory of Peace. The tower itself wears a crown of gargoyles, though the north side keeps them hidden. The octagonal spire rises with castellated bands, two rows of lucarnes, and a weathervane at its tip. Outside, the churchyard shelters box trees and yews among traditional headstones and two table tombs. A lychgate, brought from Warboys, frames the entrance as a reminder of the Hemingford Millennium in 1974. The spire’s first ten feet tilt more steeply than the rest, giving the skyline a distinctive silhouette. Visitors walk beneath the lychgate to find a place where centuries of history stand side by side.