St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary

St Mary's Church, Ottery St Mary, has long been called "a miniature Exeter Cathedral" — and the description is no flattery. This Grade I listed Devon parish church is cruciform in plan like the great cathedral, its transepts formed by twin towers rising 71 feet above a building 163 feet long, which Nikolaus Pevsner memorably described as "lying large and low like a tired beast" above the valley of the River Otter. Within are one of the oldest mechanical clocks in the country, a fan-vaulted aisle commissioned by a marchioness, medieval misericords and Green Men, and the parish where Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born.

The church was consecrated in 1260 by Bishop Bronescombe of Exeter, at a time when the manor and patronage belonged to Rouen Cathedral in Normandy — as they had since before the Norman invasion. Pevsner assumed that the tower-transepts and the outer walls of the chancel survive from that 1260 building, and that the towers were built in deliberate imitation of Exeter's.

The transforming figure arrived in the fourteenth century. In 1335 John de Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter from 1327 to 1369, bought the manor and advowson from Rouen, and on 22 January 1338 he established a collegiate foundation here with forty members. He rebuilt much of the church around 1330: the present nave, chancel, aisles and Lady Chapel date from his campaign, including the addition of the Lady Chapel at the east end and two chantry chapels flanking the chancel. The nave is of five bays; the chancel, unusually long in proportion, of six, with vestry chapels to north and south — the long east end built for the daily round of a college of priests rather than a parish congregation. The church is noted for its painted roof, and its furnishings preserve Grandisson's world: ten misericords dating from the building of the church around 1350, five bearing the arms of Bishop de Grandisson himself; two medieval carved stone Green Man sculptures; the tombs of Otho de Grandisson and his wife; the ancient altar screen and sedilia; and a wooden eagle given by the bishop.

The bishop's most celebrated legacy ticks on in the south transept tower: the Ottery St Mary astronomical clock, one of the oldest surviving mechanical clocks in the country, commonly attributed to Grandisson and adhering to Ptolemaic cosmology, with the Earth at the centre of the Solar System. Restored to working order in 1907, it still shows the heavens as the fourteenth century understood them.

Around 1520 came the church's last great medieval flourish: the expansion of the north nave aisle, complete with an elaborate fan-vaulted ceiling and pendant bosses. This is the Dorset Aisle, designed and commissioned by Cecily Bonville, 7th Baroness Harington, whose first husband was Thomas Grey, 1st Marquess of Dorset — one of the loveliest pieces of early Tudor vaulting in Devon. The college itself was dissolved on 24 December 1545 in the last wave of Henry VIII's suppressions; the church passed to the parish under the management of governors, and the other collegiate buildings were demolished.

Music has sounded here since at least the fourteenth century — organs are mentioned in Bishop Grandisson's statutes for the collegiate foundation, and by the dissolution in 1545 there were three. Whatever instruments survived into the seventeenth century were destroyed in 1645, during the English Civil War. Around 1828 Flight and Robson provided a new organ in the west gallery, moved to the south tower in 1849; Hele & Co worked on it in 1878 and 1901, Eustace and Alldridge of Exeter enlarged it after 1934 with pipework by Willis and William Hill, and Michael Farley rebuilt it again in 1990.

The Victorian restoration was thorough. The building closed on 21 May 1849 for a full restoration by William Butterfield, who lowered the floor of the transepts, crossing and western chancel to the level of the nave — adapting an east end designed for a collegiate foundation to parochial use — removed all the galleries except the south transept organ gallery, replaced the pews with open seating, paved the altar area with encaustic tiles and scraped and cleaned the plastered walls. The church reopened on 22 May 1850, the work paid for by voluntary donation, including £1,200 from Mr Justice Coleridge — the poet's nephew, of the famous Ottery family. New choir stalls designed by John Duke Coleridge were dedicated in 1908, paid for by Miss Mary Dickinson in memory of her father, the Revd Frederick Binley Dickinson; and in 1934 the three vacant niches of the ancient altar screen were filled with sculptured scenes in Beer stone by Herbert Read of Exeter, funded by Mrs Winstanley in memory of her husband Harold.

The Coleridge connection runs deep at Ottery. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in the town in 1772, son of the vicar, and a small stone plaque in the south churchyard wall commemorates the poet of "Kubla Khan" and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In the churchyard also lies Sir Ernest Mason Satow, the scholar, diplomat and Japanologist, with a plaque inside the church — originally at the British Legation chapel in Peking — commemorating his extraordinary life. The parish registers, held in the Devon Record Office, begin in 1601.

The church made history again on 26 September 2015, when St Mary's hosted the first ordination service in the Church of England to be led by a woman: Sarah Mullally, Bishop of Crediton — later Bishop of London — ordained two deacons as priests beneath Grandisson's roof.

Today St Mary's anchors a joint parish embracing St John the Baptist's at Colaton Raleigh, St James and St Anne's at Alfington, St Gregory the Great's at Harpford, St Luke's at Newton Poppleford, St Edward the Confessor's at Wiggaton, St Gregory's at Venn Ottery and St Michael the Archangel's at West Hill, and works ecumenically with the four other denominations of "Churches Together in Ottery St Mary." One of 107 listed sites in the area, the miniature cathedral of the Otter valley keeps its Ptolemaic clock turning, its fan vault floating over the Dorset Aisle, and seven centuries of Devon's history lying, in Pevsner's phrase, large and low like a tired beast.