Church of St Mary the Virgin, Reculver

The Church of St Mary the Virgin, Reculver, stands on Reculver Lane in the village of Hillborough, in the parish of Reculver in north-eastern Kent. Although the building itself is Victorian, it is the direct successor to one of the most ancient churches in England — the lost church of St Mary at Reculver, founded in the seventh century within the walls of a Roman fort, whose dramatic twin-towered ruins still stand on the coast a little to the north-east. The present church, a Gothic Revival building of the 1870s, carries forward the worshipping life of that ancient parish, and is itself a Grade II listed building of real interest.

The story of the parish reaches back to the year 669, when a church of St Mary was founded within the remains of the Roman fort of Regulbium at Reculver, on the very edge of the sea. This great Anglo-Saxon church became a place of pilgrimage and a landmark for shipping, but over the centuries the relentless erosion of the coast threatened it, and in 1809 it was mostly demolished, its famous twin towers being preserved as a seamark. A new church was needed to serve the parish inland, and so a church was built at Hillborough, about a mile and a quarter to the south-west, and consecrated in 1813.

This first Hillborough church, however, was poorly constructed, and within a few decades it had to be replaced. The present Church of St Mary the Virgin was built between 1876 and 1878 to the designs of the architect Joseph Clarke, in the Gothic Revival style fashionable in the Victorian age. In a fine act of continuity, the new church incorporated materials salvaged from the demolished medieval church at Reculver, so that fragments of the ancient building live on within it; and its baptismal font is thought to have come from the medieval All Saints' Church at Shuart, a lost church that once stood on the nearby Isle of Thanet. Thus the present church gathers up the relics of more than one vanished medieval church into its fabric.

The Church of St Mary the Virgin is, in effect, the third church dedicated to the mother of Jesus to have served this parish — the first within the Roman fort, the second the short-lived church of 1813, and the present church of 1878. It stands as the living heir to a tradition of worship reaching back more than thirteen centuries, even as the great towers of its ancient predecessor still rise above the cliffs by the sea.

Today the Church of St Mary the Virgin continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Canterbury, in the deanery of Reculver, its benefice united with those of St Bartholomew at Herne Bay and Holy Cross at Hoath. It serves the communities of Hillborough and the surrounding area, carrying on the worshipping life of the ancient parish of Reculver from its Victorian church inland.

The church stands in the village of Hillborough, near Herne Bay on the north Kent coast, in the city district of Canterbury. The famous ruins of the old church at Reculver, with their twin towers and the remains of the Roman fort, lie close by on the coast, along with the Reculver Country Park, the seaside town of Herne Bay, the resorts of Margate and Whitstable, and the ancient city of Canterbury with its great cathedral, all within easy reach.

From the church founded within the Roman fort at Reculver in 669, through the demolition of that ancient church in 1809 and the building of its successors at Hillborough in 1813 and 1876–78, the Church of St Mary the Virgin gathers more than thirteen centuries of Christian worship into one continuous story. A Grade II listed Victorian church that preserves the relics of its ancient predecessors, it remains the living parish church of Reculver — the worshipping heir to one of the oldest Christian foundations in Kent.