St Mary Magdalene's Church, Croome D'Abitot

St Mary Magdalene’s Church stands on a gentle rise in Croome Park, a landscaped estate in Worcestershire. Built of Bath stone, it is an early example of Gothic Revival on the outside and ‘pure Georgian Gothic’ within. Nikolaus Pevsner called it “one of the most serious of the Early Gothic Revival outside, one of the most elegant inside.” The church was designed by Robert Adam for George Coventry, the 6th Earl, and consecrated in 1763. Its plan includes a three-bay nave, north and south aisles, a two-bay chancel and a three-stage west tower. The tower’s lowest stage forms an open porch, and the upper stages hold quatrefoil windows and bell openings with Perpendicular tracery. The church is worth the journey for its fine Adam interiors and family monuments. The chancel acts as the Coventry mausoleum, where several barons and earls lie buried. Their black and white marble memorials show recumbent effigies and allegorical figures such as Justice and Virtue. One monument, brought from St Martin-in-the-Fields in 1915, depicts Faith receiving a reaching figure. The nave ceiling is an elliptical vault with a central plaster rose, and the floors are laid with limestone slabs inset with black slate. Plain glass fills the windows, as Adam’s stained glass was never made. Inside, the arcades rest on quatrefoil piers and the aisles have flat roofs while the nave vault rises in an ellipse. The font, carved in mahogany, once stood here but is now in the Almonry Museum in Evesham after theft and recovery. A hatchment for the 8th Earl hangs at the east end of the north aisle. Outside, the churchyard holds graves of former servants, and the wider parkland belongs to the National Trust. The setting remains little altered since Capability Brown landscaped the grounds for the 6th Earl in the 1750s.