St Mary the Virgin's Church, Bottesford

St Mary the Virgin's Church at Bottesford, in the far north-eastern corner of Leicestershire where the county meets the Vale of Belvoir, is known affectionately as the "Lady of the Vale" — a great church whose crocketed spire, at 212 feet the second highest in Leicestershire, sails above the flat vale like a ship's mast. It is an active Anglican parish church in the deanery of Framland and the Diocese of Leicester, its benefice united with eight neighbouring parishes, and it is listed Grade I.

The oldest fabric dates from the twelfth century, with additions and alterations through the following three hundred years; the nave and the famous spire belong to the fifteenth century, and a pair of gargoyles glower from the south transept. But what makes Bottesford a place of national resort is its chancel — rebuilt in the seventeenth century for one purpose: to house the monuments of the Manners family, earls and later dukes of Rutland, whose seat at Belvoir Castle stands on its hill nearby. The tombs fill the chancel completely, an unbroken dynastic procession without parallel in an English parish church. Eight successive earls of Rutland lie here: Thomas, the 1st Earl, with his countess Eleanor Paston; Henry, the 2nd, with Margaret Neville; Edward, the 3rd, with Isabel Holcroft; John, the 4th, with Elizabeth Charlton; Roger, the 5th, with Elizabeth Sidney, daughter of the poet Sir Philip Sidney; Francis, the 6th; George, the 7th; and John, the 8th, with Lady Frances Montagu — together with Elizabeth, Duchess of Rutland, in the family vault. The carvers include Gerard Johnson the elder — the Southwark sculptor whose workshop made Shakespeare's monument at Stratford — and Caius Gabriel Cibber.

One tomb among them is unique in England. The monument to Francis Manners, 6th Earl of Rutland, carries an inscription recording that his two infant sons "died in their infancy by wicked practise and sorcerye" — the only church monument in the country to attribute deaths to witchcraft. The accusation was directed at the so-called Witches of Belvoir, Joan Flower and her daughters, servants at the castle; the affair of 1618–19 ended with the daughters hanged at Lincoln, and the strange inscription has drawn the curious to Bottesford ever since.

The nineteenth century treated the church carefully. The principal restoration of 1847–48 was carried out by the Lancaster partnership of Sharpe and Paley, who restored the nave, aisles and transepts, replaced the seating and aisle roofs, removed the gallery, inserted the tower screen, added new pinnacles, refloored the church and renewed windows — all for £2,235, toward which the Duke of Rutland gave £600, the Revd F. J. Norman £550 and the Incorporated Church Building Society £110. The church's music has its own quiet history: a Forster and Andrews organ was opened in 1859 by Henry Farmer and modified by Wadsworth in 1892, replaced in 1995 by a two-manual T. C. Lewis instrument of fifteen speaking stops brought from St Hugh's, Southwark by Norman Hall and Sons. Its organists included two blind musicians — James Moore, who served for nearly half a century from 1859, and Professor Samuel Corbett — and Fred W. Carter, at the keys for forty-five years from 1926.

The churchyard completes the picture: a Grade II listed headstone to Thomas Parker and a table tomb, listed gate piers and gates to the north, and the war graves of fifteen Commonwealth service personnel — five from the First World War and ten, mostly Royal Air Force, from the Second, a reminder of the bomber airfields that once surrounded the vale. Fittingly for a church so bound to one of England's great houses, the 1985 television documentary Treasure Houses of Britain opened at Bottesford — the parish church that became the mausoleum of Belvoir, and remains the living church of its village.