St. Wystan's Church, Repton

St Wystan’s Church stands in the village of Repton, Derbyshire, on the site of an earlier Anglo-Saxon abbey. The present building mixes medieval Gothic work with older Anglo-Saxon remains. A tall west tower with recessed spire rises above the nave, and the church is dedicated to an Anglo-Saxon saint whose relics once lay in the crypt below. The church is famous for its eighth-century crypt, a rare survival praised by Pevsner as one of England’s most precious Anglo-Saxon structures. Inside the square chamber three rows of domical vaults rest on eight pillars, and the walls show traces of the original baptistery. The crypt once held the bodies of Mercian kings Æthelbald and Wiglaf, and the young prince Wigstan, whose relics were later moved to Evesham Abbey by King Cnut. Visitors find a fourteenth-century nave with aisles widened in the 1300s and a fifteenth-century clerestory under a timber roof. The south porch has two storeys, and the tower contains eight bells, the oldest dating from about 1500. Outside, the churchyard holds war graves from the Second World War and the ashes of the cricketer C. B. Fry. Nearby archaeologists uncovered a mass grave linked to the Great Danish Army, and the Repton Stone, carved with a figure thought to be King Æthelbald, is displayed in Derby Museum.