Bilsham Chapel

Bilsham Chapel stands in the quiet hamlet of Bilsham on the West Sussex coastal plain, about 1.2 kilometres southwest of Yapton village. The small flint building began as a 13th-century chapel of ease, never formally dedicated to any saint. After the Reformation it lost its religious use and became farm storage, then two labourers’ cottages, before returning to single-household life in 1972. English Heritage recognises its national importance by listing it at Grade II. The manor itself appears in the Domesday survey of 1086, though worship came later. The chapel’s oldest surviving features include a pair of 13th-century lancets on the north wall, possibly from the 1260s. Nikolaus Pevsner dates them to that decade, while others suggest the 14th century. A pointed-arched east window and later brick additions from 1840 and 1878 mark its changing uses. The 1860 survey recorded three solid stone buttresses and traces of a once-large churchyard on the farm field beside it. Inside, the single rectangular cell has two storeys of flint and sandstone with red-brick dressings. The 1878 roof of tie-beams and the 1972 dormers remain visible. The blocked north door and simple west windows complete the modest interior. Outside, the lane and adjacent field still echo the building’s long history from chapel to cottage to home.