St Mary's Church, Wilton

St Mary’s Church stands in Wilton’s Market Place, Wiltshire, built in the 15th century on the site of an earlier church. A statue of Bishop Robert de Bingham, consecrated there in 1229, still looks down from the west gable. The church was once linked to Wilton Abbey, a Benedictine convent founded by the 9th century. By the 16th century it became Wilton’s only parish church after smaller medieval churches closed and joined it. A great bell was bought in 1441 and a carved pulpit installed around 1628. The church’s history includes a major shift in 1845 when a new St Mary and St Nicholas was built nearby at the urging of the Countess of Pembroke and her son Baron Herbert of Lea. The architect Thomas Henry Wyatt and D. Brandon designed the new church in Italianate Romanesque style with Byzantine influences. Many memorials and bells were moved to the new building, leaving the old church partly demolished but still standing with its chancel and one nave bay intact. Today the ruins show three arches of the south arcade and fragments of the north arcade beside the altered eastern arch of the west tower. Restoration between 1933 and 1939 was led by Robert Worth Bingham, the US Ambassador to the UK, who traced his family line back to Bishop Robert de Bingham. The church is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust after being declared redundant in 1972.