Church of St Giles

The Church of St Giles stands in the hamlet of Kellaways, part of the village of Langley Burrell in the civil parish of Langley Burrell Without, in the Wiltshire countryside near Chippenham. The present place of worship dates from the early 19th century, but its story begins four centuries earlier, and behind the modest stone building lies one of the more colourful tales of rural church decay and renewal in the county. The church belongs to the Diocese of Bristol and is a Grade II listed building, designated on 20 December 1960 under list entry 1022353.

The first place of worship at Kellaways was the chapel of St Giles, built by 1304 as a private chapel of the Keylways family — the family whose name the hamlet itself carries. The first recorded rector was Edmund of Tytherton, in that same year 1304; the patron was Johannes de Calleway, and the Calloway family retained the patronage, with a few other names alternating, until 1429. The chapel subsequently became the parish church of Tytherton Kellaways, as the hamlet was then called, and for centuries the choice of its rector fell to the owner of the local estate. In the 17th century the local population tried, without success, to unite Tytherton Kellaways with neighbouring Tytherton Lucas into a single parish, choosing St Nicholas at Tytherton Lucas as their preferred parish church. The living of St Giles was generally a poor one, and its rector often had to hold several other parishes to make ends meet; in the 18th century the government granted investment funds intended to improve the rector's income, though in practice the measure failed to achieve what was hoped.

The old church was a building of the simplest plan — a small nave with a single doorway and two windows — and it stood next to Kellaways Mill, a location that proved its undoing. Perhaps because of its closeness to the watercourse that fed the mill, the church was frequently infested with vermin and subject to flooding, leaving it damp and positively dangerous to the health of its congregation. By 1754 it was described as being in a state of enormous decay, and in 1786 it was recorded as destroyed. In 1803 William Boucher delivered the verdict that has stuck: "The church of Kellaways in its present state is more like a shack than anything else." Local legend even tells of an infestation of rats scurrying about during services, in scenes recalling the tale of Hamelin.

In those same years work began on a new church on the opposite side of the road, in a more convenient and safer position. The new building was financed by donations and constructed to the same dimensions as its predecessor; it was finished in February 1805, though its consecration waited until 1808. The old structure was demolished and its materials put to practical use, building the wall around the new churchyard — a wall which is itself of interest to Historic England. Since then the church has remained essentially unchanged. Access improved between 1811 and 1812 with the construction of a raised causeway crossing the River Avon and its floodplain — the work of the trustees of Maud Heath, who have maintained the four-and-a-half-mile path from Chippenham to Wick Hill ever since the original deed of gift of 1474. Maud Heath's Causeway, one of Wiltshire's most beloved monuments of medieval charity, thus carries worshippers dry-shod to the church door. The churchwardens' accounts survive only from Easter 1811, and they record the small economies of parish life: the church door and gate painted between Christmas 1833 and Easter 1834, windows repaired in 1833 and 1835 — suggesting a spell of breakages — and a bolt fixed to the churchyard gate by 1832.

The church stands rather apart from the houses of the hamlet, close to the road and to Maud Heath's Causeway, with the house of the mill's owner, of about 1800, nearby. It is a small building of stone under a pitched slate roof. The west end has a pointed doorway with a Gothic pilastered surround, an ogee hood and a spherical finial, with a pointed light in the gable above; the east end has a single pointed window breaking the base of its gable. On the roof sits an octagonal wooden bell-turret with an ogee lead cap — a charming miniature crown for a miniature church.

Inside, the single-nave space is divided into three bays and lit by three pointed windows, beneath a wooden ceiling and furnished with wooden pews. The pulpit is an 18th-century piece with frieze and canopy, and the octagonal panelled stone font on its stone base is probably 18th-century too — both presumably brought over from the old church across the road, tangible links to the medieval foundation. A west gallery and box pews survived until the late 19th century, when they were removed.

St Giles today is known to many through the diarist Francis Kilvert, whose family was rooted in Langley Burrell and whose walks through this countryside — celebrated in the famous Kilvert's Diary — are still traced by visitors following the paths around the church and the causeway. Small, plain and nearly unaltered for two centuries, the church by Maud Heath's Causeway remains one of the quiet treasures of the Avon floodplain.