Church of St Candida and Holy Cross, Whitchurch Canonicorum

The Church of St Candida and Holy Cross stands on the northern edge of Whitchurch Canonicorum, a small village in the Marshwood Vale of west Dorset, and possesses a distinction shared with almost no other parish church in England: it still holds the shrine and relics of its patron saint. The relics are those of St Wite — Candida is the Latin form of her name — and the church is one of only two parish churches in the country with such a shrine, the relics having survived the Reformation alongside only Edward the Confessor's at Westminster Abbey and St Eanswythe's at Folkestone. A Grade I listed building since 1960, the church is the most complete example of Early English architecture in Dorset, and an active Church of England parish church in the deanery of Lyme Bay, the archdeaconry of Sherborne and the Diocese of Salisbury.

The church's history begins with England's greatest king. Alfred the Great founded a church on the site in the ninth century, named Hwitan Cyrican — "White Church", or Whitchurch — and bequeathed it to his youngest son Æthelweard, though nothing significant remains of that Saxon structure. In the eleventh century William the Conqueror gave the church to the monks of St Wandrille's monastery in Normandy, who began a major reconstruction in the twelfth century. In 1190 the monks sold or gave the church and benefice to the Bishop of Salisbury, and in the early thirteenth century it passed to Robert de Mandeville, Lord of Marshwood Vale, in return for an annual fee. De Mandeville renovated extensively — adding the nave, the north and south transepts and the south wall of the chancel, and erecting the shrine containing the remains of St Wite — before presenting the church in the mid-thirteenth century to the Bishop of Bath and Wells. The Bishop of Salisbury, unwilling to surrender his annual payment, forced a compromise dividing the parish tithes between the two sets of canons — and it was then that the Latin affix Canonicorum, "of the canons", attached itself to Whitchurch.

By the early fifteenth century the parish had become one of the largest in England, and the church gained its south aisle porch and parapet and its prominent tower. The shrine's reputed healing powers made the church a busy and prosperous centre of pilgrimage — until the sixteenth-century Reformation prohibited the veneration of saints and ended the pilgrim traffic abruptly. Little has substantially changed since: the rood loft was removed, the south vestry added in 1822, and restoration in the 1840s replaced the roofs of the chancel and south transept, widened the north aisle and installed the clerestory windows.

The shrine itself is a plain thirteenth-century limestone altar tomb about five feet tall: a rectangular coffin with a Purbeck Marble lid, on a base pierced by three oval openings into which pilgrims, trusting in the relics' healing powers, would place personal belongings or even diseased limbs in hope of a cure. Why it survived the Reformation's systematic destruction of shrines is unclear — perhaps its purpose was concealed and its plain design mistaken for an unremarkable tomb — but the concealment worked so well that the saint's very identity was lost. Local tradition holds that she was an Anglo-Saxon holy woman or hermit slain by marauding Vikings; another theory identifies her with Gwen Teirbron, a sixth-century Breton holy woman also known as St Blanche. In 1900 the tomb was opened, and inside lay a lead casket holding the bones of a small woman, inscribed in Latin: "HIC-REQESCT-RELIQE-SCE-WITE" — "Here lie the remains of St Wite".

Architecturally the church is cruciform, built of Lias ashlar under slate roofs, with a clerestoried nave, north and south aisles, transepts, west tower, chancel, south porch and south vestry — Early English at its heart, with Norman survivals and Perpendicular additions. The five-stage Perpendicular tower rises about seventy-five feet to a crenellated parapet, with set-back buttresses crowned by crocketed pinnacles; high on its walls are carved stone panels, including, on the south side, an archaic — possibly Viking — ship and an axe, with carvings of an adze on both sides. It holds eight bells, the oldest seventeenth-century, the newest cast by John Taylor & Co. in 2012. The south doorway is Norman, with circular nook-shafts under leafy capitals and an arch of dog-tooth ornament with beak-heads at apex and terminals, and the three arches of the south arcade are Norman too, on round piers with waterleaf and scallop capitals. On the south aisle wall is a stone carving of a two-handled cup — supposedly a representation of the Holy Grail. The four-bay north arcade is Early English, its clustered columns carrying intricately carved capitals of naturalistic foliage and trumpet-scallops beneath pointed arches, one with a bold double-chevron. The fourteenth-century nave roof is barrel-vaulted wood with painted bosses; the chancel's east wall, rebuilt in 1847–48 by the former vicar William Palmer, has three stepped lancets; the chancel stalls carry early sixteenth-century arabesque and traceried panels; the font is a Norman stone bowl carved with overlapping arches; and the octagonal Jacobean pulpit is decorated with two tiers of arches.

The memorials gather a remarkable company. In the chancel stands the highly decorated monument of Sir John Jefferey, who died in 1611, with recumbent effigy, fluted columns and ornate strapwork of cornucopias, fleurons and masks; nearby is the plainer tomb of John Wadham of Catherston — "Captain of the Queen's Majestie at Sandesfoot Castle", MP for Weymouth and Recorder of Lyme, who died in 1584, of the family that founded Wadham College, Oxford. A brass plaque of 1905 commemorates Admiral Sir George Somers, founder of the English colony of Bermuda, who died in 1610 and whose body — minus his heart, which remained in Bermuda — lies buried under the vestry. Another plaque honours Edgar Christopher Cookson VC, killed at the Battle of Es Sinn in 1915. In the churchyard lies Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian dissident assassinated in London in 1978 with a poisoned umbrella tip in one of the Cold War's most infamous murders, and near the south door rest the ashes of the broadcaster Sir Robin Day.

The modern parish includes, besides St Candida and Holy Cross as parish church and administrative centre, the nineteenth-century churches of Stanton St Gabriel's at Morcombelake and St John the Baptist at Fishpond Bottom. Pilgrims still find their way along the lanes of the Marshwood Vale to the shrine of the saint whose name the village bears — the white church of Alfred's bequest, where St Wite has lain undisturbed for eight hundred years.