St Mary's Church, West Chiltington

St Mary’s Church stands in the quiet village of West Chiltington, West Sussex, its 12th-century stone walls rising beside the old village green. The building is a Grade I listed example of Transitional Norman architecture, where rounded arches give way to pointed forms. Inside, a nine-foot hagioscope cuts through a pillar, letting worshippers in the aisle watch the priest at the altar. Wall paintings from the 12th to 14th centuries cover nave and aisle, showing scenes of the Passion and Nativity. An oak shingled spire, added in 1602, crowns the east wall of the nave. The church’s history reaches back to the Domesday Book of 1086, when a church already stood on this spot. Ian Nairn, writing in The Buildings of England, called its appearance “a very happy, unexpected effect, like a French village church.” The chancel arch is two arches in one, built to carry the thick east wall that supports the belfry. Four medieval bells hang in the tower, their inscriptions naming churchwardens and founders from the 17th century. Visitors step through a porch that may be Sussex’s oldest and enter a space filled with light from Norman windows. The painted figures on the walls appear ghostly yet vivid, their colours preserved after careful treatments in 1931 and later. The south arcade leads to a small chantry chapel built in the early 13th century. Outside, the churchyard holds over three thousand seven hundred graves, while the surrounding village lanes offer gentle walks through farmland and woodland.