St Mary the Virgin, Micheldever
St Mary the Virgin, Micheldever
St Mary’s is a Grade II* parish church on Church Street, Micheldever, Hampshire, in the Diocese of Winchester. It is at least the third church on the site; Micheldever was granted to New Minster (Hyde Abbey) as early as 903.
- Location
- Micheldever, Hampshire
- Country
- England
- County
- Hampshire
- City / town
- Micheldever
- Address
- Church Street, Micheldever, Hampshire, SO21 3DB
- Postcode
- SO21 3DB
- Built
- Late 13th-century west bay; mid-16th-century tower; octagonal nave 1808; chancel 1880
- Architect
- George Dance (nave 1808); John Colson (chancel 1880)
- Denomination
- Church of England
- Dedication
- Mary
- Diocese
- Winchester
- Parish
- Micheldever
- Grade
- II*
- Style
- Octagonal Georgian nave with Perpendicular tower
- Materials
- Rubble flint with stone dressings, brick and render; plain tiled roof
- Grid reference
- SU 512 393
- Opening hours
- Open 8am to 4pm.
- Access
- Accessible toilets in church
Overview
Historic England lists late-thirteenth-century fabric, a mid-sixteenth-century west tower, an 1808 nave by George Dance and an 1880 chancel by Colson, both for the Baring family. The materials are rubble flint with stone dressings, brick and render, under plain tiled roofs. The plan is unique in a Hampshire village: chancel, a large octagonal brick nave, the surviving west bay of the medieval nave with vestries, and a late Perpendicular tower with a south-west stair turret. The parish site, following Pevsner, calls the octagon the only rural rotunda in England, based on Dance’s St Bartholomew-the-Less at Smithfield.
Pevsner describes the exterior as an arresting, unadorned composition of three parts and the interior as brilliantly planned and lit. The chancel holds a group of Flaxman monuments of 1801–13 for the Barings. Sir Francis Baring commissioned Dance in 1806 after fire or decay of the old nave and chancel.