Church of St Morwenna and St John the Baptist, Morwenstow

The Church of St Morwenna and St John the Baptist is the parish church of Morwenstow, the most northerly parish in Cornwall — and its most northerly church — standing in remote isolation near the cliffs of the Atlantic coast. Dedicated to Morwenna, a local Celtic saint, and to John the Baptist, the Grade I listed building is an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Truro, the archdeaconry of Bodmin and the deanery of Stratton, its benefice combined with St James, Kilkhampton as the United Benefice of Kilkhampton with Morwenstow. And it is inseparable from the memory of one of the Church of England's great eccentrics: the Reverend Robert Stephen Hawker, poet and antiquary, vicar from 1835 to 1874, who in 1842 is credited with creating the modern form of the harvest festival service of thanksgiving for a good harvest.

Though the earliest fabric in the present church is Norman, an earlier Saxon church is believed to have stood on the site. The advowson was granted to St John's Hospital at Bridgwater by the Bishop of Exeter sometime before 1291, and a document of 1296 already calls the church an "old and well-known structure". Additions followed in the thirteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the building's arcades read like a geology of Cornish church-building: the twelfth- and thirteenth-century work in local dunstone, the fifteenth-century arcade in Polyphant stone, and the sixteenth-century piers and arches in granite. The plan comprises a three-stage west tower — rubble with granite quoins, string course, embattled parapet and tall corner pinnacles with crocketed finials — nave and chancel, five-bay north and south arcades, a south porch and a north-east vestry, the roofs slated in the nineteenth century. The porch doorway is the outer order of a Norman doorway moved from elsewhere, with zigzag carving and flowers in heavy relief; the church doorway proper is the inner two orders of the same Norman work, zigzag-carved on both orders, its capitals bearing birds and pine cones.

Inside, the three westerly bays of the north arcade are Norman, with zigzag carving and a carved ram's head, the two easterly bays Transitional, and the south arcade mainly Perpendicular. The pew ends carry Gothic tracery above Renaissance arabesques — one inscribed "T.K." for the Reverend Thomas Kempthorne, vicar from 1539 to 1594, another dated 1575. The Norman font is roughly shaped, with ropework decoration beneath a plain bowl. On the north chancel wall survives a fragment of mural painting from the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, depicting a female figure holding a scroll in her left hand, her right arm raised in blessing over a kneeling monk — thought to represent St Morwenna herself; a piscina is set in the south wall. The chancel screen Parson Hawker first constructed was removed after his death and replaced in 1908, made up of fragments of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century carving; the large reredos of 1908 was designed by E. H. Sedding and carved by the Pinwill sisters of Plymouth — probably Violet Pinwill — and incorporates a cartoon by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta and three engravings by John-Baptist Jackson. A seventeenth-century communion table stands at the west end, and the twentieth-century pulpit incorporates earlier woodwork as blind tracery. Beside the pulpit, a large slate plate in the floor commemorates Hawker's first wife Charlotte, who died in 1863, and in the south aisle the Hawker memorial window of 1904, by Lavers and Westlake, shows the parson with his dog, his church, and the features of his extraordinary life. The organ was built by J. W. Walker & Sons of London in 1892 and rebuilt by George Osmond of Taunton in 1969, and the tower holds a ring of six bells — four cast by Abel Rudhall in 1753, two by Mears & Stainbank of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1902.

Hawker restored the church in the 1850s, removing the box pews and replacing the wooden roof shingles; further restoration followed in or just after 1878, probably by J. P. St Aubyn, with a vestry added in 1887, more work in 1904 and 1908, and the colouring of the chancel roof restored in 1934.

It is the churchyard, though, that tells Morwenstow's most haunting stories. Among the headstones and tomb chests stands a replica of the carved and painted wooden figurehead of Caledonia — a female figure with drawn sword and shield — from the Scottish brig of that name wrecked off Morwenstow in September 1842, erected to the memory of her captain and crew, who are buried nearby; since 2008 the conserved original has been displayed inside the church. Parson Hawker was famous for recovering and giving Christian burial to drowned sailors from the merciless coast below, and the former mortuary at the churchyard entrance — a stone building now used as a store — was where their corpses were laid out. Beside it stand the wooden lychgate of 1641, extensively repaired in 1738, and a nineteenth-century freestone and slate stile probably designed by Hawker himself. A granite Celtic cross in the churchyard is said to have been moved from a nearby moor by Hawker to commemorate Charlotte, her initials C E H carved on its shaft.

Two holy wells complete the ancient sacred landscape. In a corner of the vicarage garden, about 125 metres from the church, the holy well of St John retains its medieval well house — a rectangular stone building with timber door and steeply gabled stone roof — whose water has been used for baptisms for hundreds of years. Further west, fourteen metres down the cliff face, is the holy well of St Morwenna, its medieval well house a dressed stone-gabled structure built into the side of the cliff. And on the coast path nearby stands Hawker's Hut, the little shelter the parson built from driftwood salvaged from wrecks, where he wrote his poems and watched the sea — now owned and cared for by the National Trust: the smallest property in its portfolio, and the perfect memorial to the vicar of England's wildest parish.