St John the Baptist's Church, Avon Dassett

St John the Baptist's Church stands in the village of Avon Dassett, in the gentle ironstone country of south Warwickshire near the Burton Dassett Hills. A Grade II* listed building of warm golden Hornton stone, crowned by a tall and elegant spire, it is now a redundant church in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust — no longer used for regular worship, but preserved for its architectural quality and still used for occasional concerts and community events. Though the present building is Victorian, it stands on a site of much greater antiquity, and within it survives a remarkable medieval effigy of a tonsured deacon.

The present church was built in 1868, to the designs of the architect Charles Buckeridge, on the site of an earlier church of Norman origin. Most of the fabric of the new church was fresh stone, but a small amount of material from the older building was incorporated, including fragments from the twelfth century, so that the medieval church is not entirely lost. Built of Hornton sandstone — the lovely honey-and-rust-coloured ironstone quarried in this part of the country — with tiled roofs, the church is designed in the Gothic Revival style, in the manner of the early fourteenth century. Its plan consists of a three-bay nave with a north aisle and south porch, a three-bay chancel with an organ chamber, and a west tower crowned by a tall octagonal spire that is a landmark across the surrounding hills. The tower rises in three stages, with angle buttresses and a stair turret; its lowest stage holds a four-light west window that was formerly the east window of the earlier church — a survival of the medieval building re-set in the Victorian one.

The church preserves two features of particular interest from its medieval predecessor. The three-bay north arcade is built in the Norman style, carried on round pillars, recalling the twelfth-century church. And in a recess in the north wall of the chancel is a thirteenth-century stone coffin with its carved lid, on which is depicted, in high relief, the effigy of a deacon with a tonsured head, dressed in the vestments of his office — cassock, alb, dalmatic and maniple. This medieval effigy, a rare and finely carved survival, is the church's greatest treasure, a moving link to the clergy who served the parish some seven centuries ago.

The church was declared redundant on 11 May 1983 and vested in the Churches Conservation Trust, the charity that preserves historic churches no longer needed for regular worship. Thanks to the Trust, the building has been preserved and maintained, and a major programme of work was carried out on the spire between 2007 and 2008, at a cost of around £700,000; as a result, the church bells were rung once more on 21 February 2009, for the first time in some decades — a happy moment for the village. The church remains a much-loved landmark and is still brought to life for concerts and community gatherings.

St John the Baptist's stands in Avon Dassett, a pretty stone-built village on the slopes below the Burton Dassett Hills, in the south-eastern corner of Warwickshire near the border with Oxfordshire and the town of Banbury. The Burton Dassett Hills Country Park, with its grassy summits, its medieval beacon tower and its panoramic views, lies close by; and this is the country of the English Civil War, for the first great battle of the war was fought nearby at Edgehill in 1642. The grand house and gardens of Compton Verney, the Cotswold and Warwickshire countryside, and the historic towns of Banbury and Warwick are all within easy reach.

From a Norman church on this ancient site, through the Victorian rebuilding by Charles Buckeridge in 1868 with its Norman arcade and re-set medieval window, the thirteenth-century effigy of a tonsured deacon, and its preservation by the Churches Conservation Trust with the restoration of its spire and bells, St John the Baptist's Church gathers centuries of Warwickshire history into one golden-stone building. A Grade II* listed church beneath its tall spire, cared for and kept open though no longer a parish church, it remains a treasured landmark in the village of Avon Dassett, beneath the Burton Dassett Hills.