St Andrew's Church, Wood Walton

St Andrew's Church stands utterly alone in the fields of Huntingdonshire, about two kilometres north of the village of Woodwalton in Cambridgeshire — a redundant Anglican church whose isolated silhouette is a familiar sight to thousands who have never set foot in it, for it rises just two hundred metres east of the East Coast Main Line and is visible from the passing trains. Grade II* listed and in the care of the Friends of Friendless Churches, it even graces the cover of Andrew Barr's book The Nation's Favourite Churches — a fitting tribute to one of England's most romantically situated country churches.

The church is recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, when it probably consisted of an aisleless nave and a chancel. Its lonely position is no accident of village desertion, as such settings often are: the church is thought to have been placed centrally between the three poles of its medieval world — Woodwalton Castle, a motte and bailey to the north, Sawtry Abbey to the west, and the village settlement to the south. A considerable part of the parish lies within Woodwalton Fen, the great wetland that is now one of England's most precious nature reserves. The building grew by stages: the south aisle was added about 1250, the north aisle added or rebuilt about 1330 when the chancel was also rebuilt, the tower raised in the 14th century, and the clerestory added in the 16th. The Victorians restored the church between 1856 and 1859 under Edward Browning of Stamford, rebuilding the aisle walls, tower and porch and adding a vestry; the vestry was rebuilt in 1897, the porch and part of the south aisle in 1906, and in 1911 the vestry was converted into an organ chamber.

St Andrew's is built of coursed limestone rubble with limestone dressings under terracotta tiled roofs, on a plan of four-bay clerestoried nave with north and south aisles, chancel with north organ chamber, south porch and west tower. The tower rises in three stages with diagonal buttresses to a battlemented parapet: a pointed west door with an ogee-traceried window above in the lowest stage, lancets in the middle stage and two-light bell openings in the upper. The east window has three lights, and the gabled porch carries an empty niche that once held a statue of St Andrew. Inside, the arcades tell the church's two building periods at a glance — the south arcade Early English, the north Perpendicular. The flooring is of 19th-century tiles, and the font, also 19th-century, is in 15th-century style.

The church's finest treasure is no longer within its walls but is far from lost: an original 14th-century stained glass window, described as "one of the most delicate of all fourteenth-century windows in Cambridgeshire, showing St Catherine holding her wheel", with St Lawrence beneath a decorative canopy in its second light, is on loan to the Stained Glass Museum in Ely Cathedral. The best of the monuments remaining in the church commemorate the Hussey family, who are also remembered in the 1874 tiles and the reredos; their family vault lies beneath the chancel, set between the runs of the hypocaust heating system introduced in the 19th century. Several early stone coffin lids also survive. The tower holds a ring of four bells — two cast by Joseph Eayre, one dated 1764, and two cast in 1841 by Thomas Mears II of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry — though as of 2010 the condition of the tower has made ringing impossible.

The church's recent history has been a struggle against decay and depredation. Lead was stolen from the roofs in 1956 and 1964, and after redundancy the building suffered vandalism that damaged much of the stained glass, fittings and furniture; the Casson Positive Company organ was given to St Barnabas' Church, Huntingdon. Redundancy brought one colourful interlude: the church served as a major location for "And the Wall Came Tumbling Down", a 1984 episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, known in America as Fox Mystery Theater. Salvation came through the Friends of Friendless Churches, who hold a 999-year lease effective from 24 June 1979. The structural problems have been formidable — defective drainage caused the foundations to move, the tower and the body of the church settling at different rates, with serious cracking in the chancel — but engineers' and architects' reports underpinned successful grant applications, high-level repairs to the tower and roofs were completed in 2013, and the church is no longer on the Heritage at Risk Register.

Today St Andrew's keeps its solitary watch between the fen, the railway and the ghost of its castle — a Domesday church saved by friendship, its St Catherine window shining on in Ely, its silhouette still lifting the hearts of travellers on the trains racing past.