Church of St Mary

The Church of St Mary stands in the village of Sheriffhales, near the eastern edge of Shropshire, on the historic border country where the county meets Staffordshire — for most of its history the parish lay mainly in Staffordshire, with only a small portion in Shropshire. A square-towered church of red sandstone, typical of its region, St Mary's is a building of real antiquity whose history reaches back at least to the Norman period and possibly into Anglo-Saxon times, and whose fabric records the changing fortunes of nearly a thousand years.

The origins of the church are bound up with the nearby collegiate church at Shifnal. It is plausible that St Mary's began as a chapel dependent on Shifnal in the Anglo-Saxon period, becoming detached after the upheavals of the Norman Conquest; the first clear evidence of a parish church at Sheriffhales occurs in a charter of 1081, five years before the Domesday survey. For more than three centuries the church belonged to the Abbey of Saint-Évroul, an important monastery in the Pays d'Ouche region of south-eastern Normandy — one of the many English churches held by French abbeys as "alien priories" after the Conquest. When such foreign holdings were suppressed during the long wars with France, King Henry V transferred Sheriffhales to Sheen Priory, the great Carthusian house he had founded near London.

The early modern period, from the Reformation through the English Civil War and the Commonwealth, brought rapid change and turbulence to the parish, followed by a quieter age after the Restoration of 1660. It was at this very moment that the church suffered its greatest physical disaster: in November 1660 the nave and north aisle collapsed. The rebuilding that followed, begun in 1661, amounted to a major extension and improvement of the church, and much of the present fabric dates from that work, though some parts of the building still go back to the High Middle Ages. Further restoration was carried out in the Victorian age, and there was additional refurbishment in the twentieth century, but the overall character of St Mary's remains that of a square-towered sandstone church, dignified and solid in the manner of its region.

Today the Church of St Mary continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Lichfield, serving the village of Sheriffhales. Its long history — its possible Saxon origins, its centuries as a possession of a Norman abbey, its rebuilding after the collapse of 1660, and its Victorian and modern restorations — make it a building of considerable interest, a layered record of English church history in the Shropshire and Staffordshire borderland.

The church stands in the village of Sheriffhales, in the quiet farming country near the eastern edge of Shropshire, close to the town of Shifnal and the new town of Telford. The great house and park of Weston Park, straddling the Shropshire–Staffordshire border, lies nearby, along with the historic town of Newport, the Royal Air Force Museum at Cosford, and the wider countryside of the two counties, with the Ironbridge Gorge World Heritage Site within easy reach.

From its possible origins as a Saxon chapel of Shifnal, through its medieval centuries as a possession of the Norman Abbey of Saint-Évroul and Sheen Priory, the collapse and rebuilding of 1660–61 and the restorations of later ages, the Church of St Mary gathers nearly a thousand years of history into one building. A square-towered sandstone church on the Shropshire border, it remains the living parish church of Sheriffhales — a venerable survival in the border country of the West Midlands.