All Saints' Church, Newchurch

All Saints' Church stands at the north end of Newchurch on the Isle of Wight, perched where the road drops steeply away to the west so that the church seems to ride a bluff above the village. The Victorian poet Venables caught the view: "To the north the gaze embraces the whole of the vale of Newchurch with the undulating ridge of the chalk downs beyond... the white cliffs of Culver." With its rough sandstone walls, red-tiled roofs, barn-like aisles and — most distinctively — its white weatherboarded timber tower with a short spire, All Saints' is one of the most recognisable and best-loved churches on the Island.

Its history begins at the Conquest. The church was one of six on the Isle of Wight given by William FitzOsbern — the Conqueror's right-hand man and first lord of the Island — to the abbey of Lyre in Normandy, and it later passed to Beaulieu Abbey. When the monasteries were dissolved, Henry VIII entrusted it to the new See of Bristol. Newchurch was one of only seven original parishes on the Island, its territory once stretching coast to coast — hence "new church", new in the eleventh century — and though long since divided among newer parishes, the church keeps the dignity of that ancient standing.

The building is essentially the work of thirteenth-century masons remodelling a twelfth-century predecessor — and the archaeology can still be read in the stones. The four-foot-thick east wall of the nave, into which the transept piers do not bond, probably belonged to the original church of about 1200; the west wall, with its two small lancets and circular cusped window in the gable, is of the same date. The thirteenth-century rebuilding produced what stands today: a nave of three bays (a fourth formed by the transept arches), north and south aisles, a long chancel, deep north and south transepts, and a south porch carrying the wooden tower. The massive piers at the transept entrances suggest a central tower was once intended, and the transept and chancel arches are strikingly heavy, with pointed heads and triple-splayed orders on curved abaci. The fifteenth century cut the way to the rood loft through the south aisle — the entrance survives, with its steps and semicircular head — and the sixteenth lengthened the south transept by ten feet, inserted its east window, and widened the porch eastward to support the tower that held the three bells recorded in the inventory of 1553. Over the south transept chapel rises a rare "Sancte bell" turret, from which a bell was struck at the elevation during the Mass.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries belonged to the Dillingtons of Knighton Gorges Manor, the church's great patrons, who used both transepts for family vaults — Sir Robert Dillington obtained a faculty for the north vault in 1688, and the south followed in 1725, four years after the baronetcy became extinct. Eight inscriptions in the north transept commemorate the family between 1674 and 1749. To the Dillington period belong the oak pulpit with its quaint sounding-board and canopy, and the carved "Pelican" lectern said to have come from Frome; their alms-dish of 1737, inscribed as the gift of Mrs Dillington, is still among the plate, alongside a chalice with 1620 pricked on its cover. Over the south door hangs a panel with the royal arms of William III dated 1700, and tablets in the porch record Richard Gard's contribution to the grammar school founded by Richard Andrews in 1595. Wall memorials remember Lieutenant-General Maurice Bockland MP (died 1765) and the author W. Bowles (died 1748).

The parish register runs from 1582 and preserves curiosities including a note of the Chichester earthquake of 30 November 1811, felt across the Island at 3.20 in the morning. The white tower holds a light ring of six bells — four cast by Thomas Mears of London in 1810, two older ones inscribed by Anthony Bond (1626) and dated 1589 — with a tenor of just seven hundredweight. A Bevington pipe organ of 1857 serves the music, and the church was restored in 1883 by A. R. Barker at the instigation of the vicar, Alfred Dicker. Still an active Church of England parish church, All Saints' remains what it has been for over nine centuries: the mother church of the vale it overlooks.