St Mary's Stoke D'Abernon

What a stonkingly odd church Stoke D'Abernon is. Its oddness begins with its location, way outside Stoke D'Abernon in the grounds of what is now a school, but used to be the manor house. The church website claims that it began life as an Anglo-Saxon manorial chapel possibly as early as the 7th century, whereas The Buildings of England chooses to lead on Ian Nairn's description of it as 'the classic example of bad 19th-century restoration, the worst even in Surrey'. Certainly from the outside it looks weird. Inside you can see what Nairn meant even more clearly: the restoration of the 1850s and 60s disposed of a perfectly serviceable Norman chancel arch and replaced it with a Gothic one, for instance. At some stage the original fragmentary wall paintings were expanded by an imaginative reconstruction - but still presented as a fragment, as though something larger remained to be uncovered. Which it didn't. But then along came the postwar incumbent Canon JHL Waterson, who did away with as much Victoriana as he possibly could and stuffed the church with bits and pieces ransacked from elsewhere. To him we owe much of the glass, the bizarre oak aumbry, and I suspect the towering figure of the BVM. These now sit among the older fragments - the 13th-century chest, the Jacobean pulpit, the brasses and effigies - lending a degree of crazy dignity to what's essentially an unremarkable building. At some point a coloured reredos was done away with, leaving the east wall blank. 

The lords of the manor were the Vincents, but it was the Vaillants who monopolised the Rectory in the pre-restoration days. Julia, daughter of Francis Maceroni (‘soldier, diplomat, revolutionary, balloonist, author, inventor, and bigamist’), whose jewels ended up adorning the processional cross at St James's Weybridge, was married to a Vaillant - but that's a story for another day. 

So here you have a church which has a variety of Catholic bits and pieces in it. The current priest, Rev'd Phaedra, can be seen on the website (the photo comes up if you wait long enough) wearing some nice Gothic vestments which I know her predecessor took on board as well, and he was an SCP member. But while in line with most moderate churches these days the core of the worship is Eucharistic, I once preached at Stoke d'Abernon at a bracingly stiff 1662 Choral Evensong and I also know another incumbent had a hard time with some of the more traditionalist elements there. St Mary's never figured in any of the Anglo-Catholic church guidebooks, no matter how determined Canon Waterson was to make it look the part. What you see, brethren, sometimes misleads.