St Mary and All Saints' Church, Great Budworth

St Mary and All Saints' Church presides over the centre of Great Budworth, one of Cheshire's prettiest villages, and is by common consent among the finest churches in the county. Grade I listed, it earned a place on Alec Clifton-Taylor's list of the "best" English parish churches; Raymond Richards called it "one of the finest examples of ecclesiastical architecture remaining in Cheshire", and the authors of the Buildings of England judged it "one of the most satisfactory Perpendicular churches of Cheshire", adding that "its setting brings its qualities out to perfection". It remains an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Chester, giving its name to its own deanery.

The Domesday Book of 1086 records a priest at Great Budworth, and in 1130 William FitzNigel, Constable of Chester and Baron of Halton, gave the church and its living to the Augustinian canons of Norton Priory. Geoffrey de Dutton was an early benefactor, as later were the Booths of Twemlow. The oldest part of the present building is the fourteenth-century Lady Chapel, formed by the long north transept in the Decorated style; the rest of the church rose in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in confident Perpendicular. In the 1850s Rowland Egerton-Warburton of Arley Hall — squire, poet and devoted churchman — paid for a restoration.

Built of red sandstone and crenellated throughout, the church comprises a west tower, a six-bay clerestoried nave with north and south aisles, a chancel flanked by chapels, the Lady Chapel transept on the north, the shorter Warburton Chapel transept on the south, and a south porch. The tower is particularly fine: diagonal buttresses, an octagonal south-west turret, a Tudor-arched west window, small ringers' windows, a west clock, louvred two-light belfry windows, and a crenellated top with eight crocketed pinnacles — with a sculpture of St Christopher on its north side and the Blessed Virgin on the south.

The interior is rich in age. The nave ceiling of the first quarter of the sixteenth century is divided into seventy-two panels. In the Warburton Chapel stand five oak stalls probably of the thirteenth century — considered the earliest in Cheshire — together with the alabaster effigy of Sir John Warburton, who died in 1575. The octagonal font is fifteenth-century, the sanctuary keeps two Jacobean chairs, and the church preserves two old chests, one medieval and one dated 1680. The screen to the north transept is by Anthony Salvin. The glass spans the centuries: Kempe windows of 1883–1901 in the east window and the east windows of both aisles, and — a striking contrast — Expressionist glass of 1965 by Pierre Fourmaintraux in the north transept. The north chapel holds a memorial to Sir Peter Leicester, the seventeenth-century Cheshire historian, and the organ designed by Samuel Renn and installed in 1839, recognised by the British Institute of Organ Studies as an Organ of Historic Importance and restored in 2004 by Goetze and Gwynn at a cost of £60,000. The tower carries a ring of eight bells, all by Rudhall of Gloucester — six of 1733, one of 1760 and one of 1822. The parish registers begin in 1559, the churchwardens' accounts in 1699.

The churchyard completes the picture, with four structures separately listed at Grade II: the sandstone and brick churchyard wall, partly late medieval with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century additions and incorporating a water trough; the oak-framed lychgate of 1920, a First World War memorial with a crucifix on its front gable; a late eighteenth-century stone sundial with copper dial and gnomon; and, just outside the wall, the village stocks, probably early eighteenth-century — a reminder of older forms of parish discipline. The churchyard also holds the war graves of six British servicemen, four of the First World War and two of the Second. Church, lychgate, stocks and winding village street together make Great Budworth one of the most perfect ensembles in Cheshire, with the great Perpendicular church at its heart.