Church of Saint Mary Magdalene, Whitgift

The Church of St Mary Magdalene stands in the hamlet of Whitgift, on the south bank of the tidal River Ouse in the East Riding of Yorkshire — a Grade I listed medieval church famous throughout Britain for a single eccentric detail: its tower clock displays the number thirteen, in Roman numerals, where twelve o'clock should be. No other clock in Britain does so.

The story of the site begins with the Conquest. William the Conqueror donated the entire area around Whitgift to the monastery of Selby Abbey, and Henry de Lacy gave what became the churchyard to the monks for the building of a chapel or church. The present St Mary Magdalene is the second church to stand here: the first, dating to about 1130 and owing its patronage to St Mary's Abbey in York, was ordered destroyed by the vicar of Adlingfleet, its stones reused to build the rectory at Adlingfleet — John le Franceys wanted it demolished to prevent its appropriation by Selby Abbey. The demolition had certainly happened by 1291 and is thought to have come around the middle of the twelfth century. That first church was no backwater chapel: the ecclesiastical authorities granted the people of Whitgift the rights to an annual fair and a weekly market, along with the establishment of the ferry, making the church a place of real consequence on the tidal Ouse. The yearly Feast of the Blessed Mary Magdalene was kept here before the second church was built, so both churches are thought to have shared the same dedication.

The current church dates to 1304, and unusually, the date is known precisely — from an early fourteenth-century document preserved at Selby Abbey, in which Henry de Lacy granted to the abbey "the cemetery in the vill of Wytegift consecrated a long time ago, as it is enclosed by ditches, as far as a certain place where our fair is held yearly at the feast of the Blessed Mary Magdalene," providing that the present and future inhabitants of the vills of Ousefleet, Whitgift, Eastoft, Reedness and Swinefleet, along with the tenants of eleven bovates of land in Folquardeby and thirteen in Haldenby — all within the boundaries of the parish of Snaith — would hear divine office and receive the sacraments there. The right of advowson was held by the local lords of the manor; on the execution of Thomas of Lancaster it reverted to the Crown, then passed through St Mary's Abbey in York before the church was described as lying in the parish of Snaith. In 1956 Lord Deramore, who held the advowson through that lineage, transferred it to the Bishop of Sheffield.

The building is largely Perpendicular in design, its tower faced internally in brick. The octagonal piers date from the fourteenth century, with the arcade in the Decorated style, and the benches and pews are seventeenth-century. The two upper stages of the tower were added in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with Perpendicular details. The south aisle was built in the Elizabethan era — a flourish owed to the church's connection with John Whitgift, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1583 to 1604: though his immediate family hailed from Grimsby, the family name derived wholly from the village. The late nineteenth century brought renovation and a new chancel, and the church was reconsecrated in 1899 by William Maclagan, Archbishop of York.

The river that made Whitgift important has also been the building's slow undoing. Standing so close to the Ouse, parts of the church have subsided: the Victorian chancel appears to be sinking faster than the rest of the structure, and a side door in the tower now stands only half above ground level, its lower half swallowed by the settling earth. The church was given its Grade I listing in 1967; the churchyard adds a Grade II listed war memorial, a Grade II listed tombstone path along the south side of the church, and one Commonwealth War Grave.

And then there is the clock. Installed on the north side of the tower in 1919, made by Potts of Leeds and carrying the Latin inscription In terra pax — "peace on earth" — it displays XIII where XII should be, in what is thought to have been an accident, though differing backstories circulate. Its uniqueness in the British Isles brought it strange wartime fame: during the Second World War the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw declared that German bombers flying up the Humber Estuary would be flying so low that they would "be able to see the thirteenth hand of Whitgift church clock." Besides the famous external clock there is a seventeenth-century clock in the nave, and the tower holds three bells.

Today St Mary Magdalene is part of The Marshland Benefice in the Deanery of Snaith and Hatfield, in the Diocese of Sheffield — historically it was a perpetual curacy in the Deanery of Pontefract and the Diocese of York. The church of the marshland vills keeps its watch over the Ouse as it has for seven centuries: fair-ground and ferry-point of the medieval river, namesake of an Archbishop of Canterbury, slowly settling into the flood-plain, and telling the only thirteen o'clock in Britain.