Parish Church of All Saints, Westbury

All Saints' Church is the main Church of England parish church of Westbury in Wiltshire, beneath the famous White Horse downs — a Grade I listed building largely rebuilt around 1437, on a site where Christians have worshipped since Saxon times, and home to a claim few churches anywhere can match: its tower holds the third heaviest peal of eight bells hung for change ringing in the world.

A church stood here by 1086, recorded in the Domesday Book — most likely a Saxon wooden building on the same spot. The Normans built the first stone church about 1220, replaced in the fourteenth century by a Gothic church on the same plan, built between roughly 1340 and 1380 in the transitional style between Decorated and Perpendicular; parts of it survive in the lower transepts, nave and tower. The great rebuilding came from about 1437: a clerestory was added to the nave, three chapels were built, and the central tower was raised to its present 84 feet. The north chapel was built and endowed by William de Westbury, a judge of the King's Bench who died in 1448–49, with his father. The mid-sixteenth century added the south porch with its little room above and extended the chancel eastward to its present length. Pevsner likened the church to nearby Edington Priory, "much renewed", and found the west front "remarkable, with battlements rising up the steep lean-to roofs of the aisles and the less steep nave roof".

The Victorians restored extensively from 1847 under the Rev Stafford Brown, with T. H. Wyatt as architect: a new nave roof, a large new west window, a small vestry, buttressing for the chancel's east wall, and the removal of the gallery. A graver crisis came in 1968, when a broken old culvert was found to have saturated the clay beneath the foundations — cracks were opening in the stonework and the tower was leaning. The remedy was heroic: 150 concrete piles driven up to forty feet deep and connected with new cross beams, stabilising the whole building.

The bells are Westbury's glory. The unusually rectangular central tower contains the third heaviest change-ringing peal of eight in the world, after Sherborne Abbey and St Peter's Cathedral in Adelaide, and is much loved by visiting ringers. Until 1921 the tower held six bells by six different founders, cast between 1671 and 1738; John Taylor & Co of Loughborough, engaged to overhaul and augment them, found at the foundry that none could be satisfactorily retuned — so with the church's permission they recast all six and added two more, producing the present octave, whose tenor weighs 35 hundredweight and strikes C sharp. A sanctus bell of about 1299 and an unused bell of around 1600, hanging in an old wooden frame above the peal, complete the tower's remarkable collection.

The monuments include a bust by Sir Robert Taylor of William Phipps (c.1681–1748), born at Heywood nearby, who rose to be Governor of Bombay; the churchyard has eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century table tombs and the parish war memorial of about 1919–20, a tall stone cross on a carved three-stage base.

The ancient parish of Westbury once stretched east to Bratton and west to Dilton, with dependent churches in both: St James' at Bratton gained its own district in 1845, while the fourteenth-century St Mary's at Old Dilton — its congregation dwindling after Holy Trinity was built at Dilton Marsh in 1844 — went out of regular use in 1900 and passed to the Churches Conservation Trust in 1974, though still consecrated. Holy Trinity at Heywood (1849) and the Church of the Holy Saviour at Westbury Leigh (1877, enlarged 1889–90) further reduced the old parish. Today All Saints' stands at the centre of the White Horse benefice, embracing the old and new Dilton churches, Holy Saviour and the little 1905 church at Brokerswood — the mother church of the Westbury country, its mighty bells calling across the vale below the chalk horse.