Church of St Michael and All Angels, Great Torrington

The Church of St Michael and All Angels at Great Torrington in north Devon carries the scars and stories of one of the most terrible single events of the English Civil War: the night in February 1646 when its tower, packed with Royalist gunpowder, exploded with dreadful loss of life. A Grade II* listed building since 1951, the rebuilt church is now a treasure-house of curiosities, from a Cardinal Wolsey connection to a window honouring a forgotten pioneer of the computer.

The earliest record of a parish church at Torrington is from 1259, when a vicar was appointed, though an earlier church probably stood on the site; the oldest surviving fabric dates from the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Among its medieval rectors was no less a figure than Thomas Wolsey, the future Cardinal and Archbishop of York. Then came the catastrophe. At the Battle of Torrington in February 1646, the Royalists holding the town had stored some eighty barrels of gunpowder in the church; as the Parliamentarians under Fairfax captured the town they shut their prisoners inside, and somehow the powder detonated. The blast, believed to have erupted from the south transept — the old tower — in a north-westerly direction, destroyed several pillars, and the fire that followed consumed the old furnishings and monuments. Many of the victims lie in a mass grave beneath the cobbled mound opposite the main entrance, with a memorial stone beside the door. The church was rebuilt by 1651, in the midst of the Commonwealth. Fittingly for so contested a place, another of its clergy was Hugh Peter, the fiery preacher and political adviser to the Parliamentary cause.

The church today blends its seventeenth-century rebuilding with Victorian and Georgian work. The fine wagon roof is of the pattern typical of this corner of England; the Geometric window tracery of nave, aisles and chancel dates from about 1861 and is by William White, whose restoration of 1861–64 also swept away the old galleries and box pews. The present tower and spire were completed in 1828 by W. B. Cock, the local builder who also designed Torrington's Pannier Market — his initials are set into the cobbles outside the south-west door — and the carved stone heads by the west door represent Cardinal Wolsey and Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII. The tower carries a ring of eight bells: five cast by Abraham Rudhall of Gloucester in 1716 and rehung in 1884, with the tenor, treble and second cast by John Taylor & Co in 1934. Most remarkable is the clock bell of 1632, which survived the explosion of 1646 and now hangs in the spire.

The interior is full of stories. The seventeenth-century pulpit, carved with cherubs, wreaths and gilding, lost its matching sounding board in the Victorian restoration — thrown out, rescued from a builder's yard, given to the Victoria and Albert Museum, and finally restored to the church "on loan" in 1960. The Willis organ is one of the finest in the West Country, twin to the organ of Truro Cathedral. On the north wall are monuments to Mrs Penelope Johnson and Mrs Palmer, both relations of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who visited them regularly — once bringing the great Dr Samuel Johnson with him. The red-veined marble font with quatrefoil panels was made in 1914, and opposite it an oak cabinet holds an original wax impression of the Great Seal of England from the reign of James I, probably once attached to the borough's charter and restored at the V&A in 1929. The reredos of 1878 carries Harry Hems's relief of the Last Supper; the crucifix behind the pulpit was carved at Oberammergau in 1934 by Willy Bierling, who played St John the Evangelist in that year's Passion Play; the rood in the chancel arch, added in 2002, came from St Oswald's, Small Heath in Birmingham, where it had been a war memorial; and the war memorial here contains fragments of glass salvaged from the bomb-damaged Westminster Chapter House. A small Tudor room at the east end of the south aisle survived the 1646 blast and serves as the vestry — possibly the Tudor library mentioned in old records, though its books are long gone.

The Chapel of St James in the south transept, named after the demolished chapel of Torrington Castle and furnished as a memorial to Frank Emlyn Jones (vicar 1894–1934, later Archdeacon of Barnstaple), occupies the site of the old exploded tower. Its reredos figures honour the local churches — St Michael for Great Torrington, St Giles for Little Torrington, St Mary Magdalene for Taddiport among them — beneath a copy of Caravaggio's Ecce Homo. The icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa to the left of the altar hangs there as the result of a case that made legal history: when the diocesan chancellor refused permission for its installation, the parish appealed in 1984 to the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved — which had never previously sat — and won. The chapel window commemorates Thomas Fowler, the Torrington apothecary and inventor, its border showing his thermosiphon (the ancestor of central heating) and his calculating machine, a forerunner of the modern computer admired by Charles Babbage himself.

A traditional Catholic parish of the Church of England, whose twentieth-century vicars included William Keble Martin — author of the beloved Concise British Flora in Colour, vicar 1934–43 — St Michael's remains the parish church of its hilltop market town, its churchyard closed to burials since 1850 but its long, explosive, inventive history very much alive.