St Mary's Church

St Mary’s Church stands on a low hill above fields near Lower Gravenhurst, Bedfordshire, about sixteen kilometres south-east of Bedford. Built for Sir Robert de Bilhemore in the fourteenth century, it is a small rectangular church of ironstone rubble with a west tower added around 1400. The nave and chancel form one space only fourteen metres long, and the tower rises in three stages with diagonal buttresses and a battlemented parapet. Inside, a brass records Sir Robert’s death about 1361, and a polychrome monument of 1606 commemorates Benjamin Piggot and his three wives. The fifteenth-century octagonal font survives, its cover from the next century, and the rood screen still carries traces of painted figures. A wrought-iron hourglass stand once timed sermons, and a window by John Hall & Sons shows Archangels Michael and Gabriel. The church is looked after by the Churches Conservation Trust and keeps its simple medieval plan unchanged. Visitors see the plain exterior with its tiled roofs and the tower’s pyramidal cap crowned by a cross. Within, the chancel’s east window and the nave’s side doorways frame the quiet interior, where the founder’s brass and Piggot’s monument stand beside the painted screen and the old font.