St Mary Magdalene's Church, Croome D'Abitot

St Mary Magdalene's Church at Croome D'Abitot in Worcestershire is one of the most remarkable estate churches in England — a collaboration between Lancelot "Capability" Brown and Robert Adam, standing on its hill in Croome Park as an eye-catcher for Croome Court below. A former Anglican church, now redundant and in the care of The Churches Conservation Trust, it is a Grade I listed building, and Nikolaus Pevsner paid it a double compliment that has stuck: it is, he wrote, "one of the most serious of the Early Gothic Revival outside, one of the most elegant inside".

The first record of a church at Croome D'Abitot comes from 1283, when the dedication was to St James the Apostle. The exact position of that medieval church is unknown, though it is thought to have stood near the present site of Croome Court. Its fate was sealed in the 1750s, when George Coventry, 6th Earl of Coventry, resolved to demolish the Jacobean house he had inherited and remake his entire estate. He commissioned Capability Brown — in Brown's first great independent commission — to design the new house, together with a church on higher land, and to landscape the gardens and grounds; Robert Adam was engaged to design the interiors of both house and church, along with various structures in the park. The new church was consecrated and dedicated to St Mary Magdalene in 1763, and remarkably little has changed since, apart from the repositioning of the pulpit and pews during the 19th century.

The building is of Bath stone, its exterior an early example of the Gothic Revival while the interior is in what has been called "pure Georgian Gothic" — Gothic dress over Georgian elegance. The plan comprises a three-bay nave with north and south aisles, a two-bay chancel, and a west tower of three stages divided by string courses. The lowest stage of the tower forms a porch open on the north, west and south sides, entered through iron gates, with tall carved doors at the entrance to the church itself — gates and doors alike designed by Adam. The middle stage has circular quatrefoil windows, the top stage bell openings with Perpendicular tracery, and the tower is crowned by a quatrefoil frieze, a pierced embattled parapet and crocketed pinnacles; the parapets around the rest of the church are likewise embattled. The nave has three windows a side, with niches at the ends of the aisles, two blank windows flanking each side of the chancel, and a large window at the east end.

Inside, the arcades rise on quatrefoil piers beneath plastered, coved ceilings; the aisle roofs are flat, while the nave ceiling is an elliptical vault with a moulded plaster centrepiece, and the floor is laid with limestone slabs set with inserts of black slate. Adam designed stained glass for the windows, but it was never made, and all the glazing remains plain — flooding the white interior with light. The church's most famous furnishing has had an eventful life: the font, designed by Adam and made of elaborately carved mahogany, a bowl with cover standing on a tripod base, was stolen from the church, later recovered, and is now kept at the Almonry Museum in Evesham.

The chancel occupies a far greater proportion of the church than usual, and for good reason: it serves as the mausoleum of the Coventry family, whose monuments were brought here from the earlier church. To the right of the altar stands the black and white marble memorial to Thomas Coventry, 1st Baron Coventry, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, who died in 1640 — his effigy reclines between figures personifying Justice, who holds the Great Seal, and Virtue. Beside it is the memorial to the 2nd Baron (died 1661) with his coat of arms, and elsewhere in the church the 4th Baron (died 1687) reclines on a sarcophagus, reaching towards a figure of Faith — a monument that formerly stood in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London and was brought to Croome in 1915. At the east end of the north aisle hangs a hatchment for George Coventry, 8th Earl of Coventry, who died in 1843. The roll of burials reads like the family's pedigree: the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Barons Coventry, the 1st and 2nd Earls, and the 5th through 9th Earls all lie here, while the churchyard outside holds the graves of the family's former servants.

The Coventrys cared for the church as long as they lived at Croome Court, but the family moved to Earls Croome in 1949. The dwindling congregation arranged repairs in the 1960s yet could not sustain the building; it was declared redundant on 30 October 1973 and vested in The Churches Conservation Trust in 1975. Croome Court itself and the surrounding parkland now belong to the National Trust, so that Brown's first masterpiece of landscape and Adam's jewel-box church are once again presented as a single composition. The church has even had a turn on screen, featuring as a location in the 2015 short war drama Our Father — one more chapter for a building that has been an ornament, a mausoleum and a parish church on its Worcestershire hilltop for over 260 years.