St Mary the Virgin's Church, North Stoke

St Mary the Virgin's Church stands in the tiny, almost deserted hamlet of North Stoke, set in a great loop of the River Arun in the Horsham District of West Sussex. A partly eleventh-century cruciform building of flint and stone, raised on an ancient earthwork whose origins reach back before Christianity itself, it is one of the most atmospheric and least altered of all Sussex churches — "movingly eloquent of centuries of remote Sussex agricultural life", as one writer put it. No longer used for regular worship, it was declared redundant in 1992 and entrusted to the Churches Conservation Trust, and English Heritage lists it at Grade I, the highest grade, reserved for buildings of exceptional and more than national importance. To visit it is to step into a church that has scarcely changed in seven hundred years.

North Stoke is among the remotest of English churches, a fragment of a village now far smaller than it once was. It sits directly opposite South Stoke, to which it is joined by a half-mile footpath across the Arun, but to reach it by road requires an eight-mile drive around Arundel Park and down a long dead-end track from Houghton; it can also be approached on foot along the downland paths from Burpham. This isolation has been the church's great preservation, for it was spared the heavy-handed restorations that swept through almost every other Sussex parish church in the Victorian age.

A church here was already recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086, and was probably a wooden Saxon building; later in the eleventh century the present nave seems to have been raised over its foundations. That nave is tall and wide, with a single window on each of its north and south sides and no aisles — the simple, austere shell of a Norman village church. The building then grew by stages over the following two centuries. A chancel in the Early English Gothic style was added in the mid-thirteenth century, its north and south lancet windows showing how church design had advanced since Norman times. About the year 1290 the church was made cruciform by the addition of north and south transepts, their windows filled with the flowing tracery of the Decorated Gothic style. The north transept was built more squarely and strongly than the south, in the expectation that a tower would one day rise upon it — but the tower was never built, and in its place a small belfry was set, in the words of Nikolaus Pevsner, "astonishingly situated astride the ridge" of the roof, an unusual and memorable feature.

It was around 1290, too, that the church received some small stained-glass windows depicting the Coronation of the Virgin — a very early example by Sussex standards, dating from the period when stained glass was moving away from plain grisaille patterns and the simple Tree of Jesse towards the depiction of biblical figures. In the early fourteenth century the nave and chancel were divided by a remarkable horseshoe-shaped chancel arch, built of clunch — a soft chalky stone — and covered with elaborate decorative mouldings. Above it survive the remains of a contemporary wall painting, and on either side is a recess, the left-hand one carved with a human hand on its corbel. The wall paintings, depicting flowers and foliage, are said to have inspired the sixteenth-century Sussex artist Lambert Barnard in his designs for the painted vaults at nearby Boxgrove Priory and Chichester Cathedral — a small remote church thus leaving its mark on two of the great monuments of the county.

What makes North Stoke so precious is precisely what it lacks: the restorations and refittings that have smoothed away the medieval character of so many churches. It was never restored in the nineteenth century. Some careful work was carried out by the antiquary and architect Philip Mainwaring Johnston in 1910, and the east window of the chancel is a modern replacement, but otherwise the fabric is astonishingly original. The simple timber roof has lasted more than seven hundred years without the need for alteration, its beams still clearly visible in the nave and south transept. The interior is plainly decorated and full of light, with mostly plain glass and whitewashed walls, and it is this "delightfully unrestored" appearance that gives the church its timeless atmosphere. There are few memorials compared with other Sussex churches of similar age, so that nothing distracts from the bare beauty of the ancient stone and timber.

The church's story took an extraordinary turn in 2007. For centuries its dedication had been forgotten — lost since the Reformation or before — so that it was known simply as North Stoke Church. Then, late in 2007, two amateur archaeologists, Tony and Lesley Voice, attending an ecclesiastical archaeology course at the University of Sussex, were examining documents at The National Archives in Kew when they found a piece of vellum stuck to the back of another. It proved to be a letter written by Stephen Bersted, Bishop of Chichester, to King Edward I in 1275, which revealed that the church had been dedicated to Mary the Virgin. On the strength of this discovery a rededication ceremony was held on 8 December 2007, at which the building was officially renamed St Mary the Virgin's Church — recovering, after more than four centuries, the name it had borne in the Middle Ages. The same research also brought to light the involvement of William FitzAlan, Earl of Arundel, in the medieval life of the church.

On 1 March 1992 the Diocese of Chichester declared the church redundant, and it was placed in the care of what was then the Redundant Churches Fund and is now the Churches Conservation Trust, the national charity that preserves historic churches no longer needed for regular worship. The Trust cares for five former churches in West Sussex, the others lying at Chichester, Church Norton, Tortington and Warminghurst, and St Mary's is kept open for visitors every day. Its former parish has been combined with that of St Michael and All Angels at Amberley, under the legal name "Amberley with North Stoke", part of a wider benefice that also includes the churches of Greatham, Parham and Wiggonholt.

The setting could hardly be more beautiful. North Stoke lies deep in the valley of the Arun beneath the South Downs, within the South Downs National Park, surrounded by water meadows, downland and woods. The medieval town of Arundel, with its great castle and Roman Catholic cathedral, lies a short distance downstream; the picturesque village of Amberley, the Amberley Museum, and the long-distance South Downs Way and Monarch's Way footpaths are all close at hand, while the Arun itself draws walkers and naturalists to one of the loveliest stretches of the Sussex countryside.

From a Saxon church recorded in Domesday, through the Norman nave, the thirteenth-century chancel and transepts with their belfry astride the roof, the early stained glass and clunch chancel arch, the wall paintings that may have inspired Lambert Barnard, and the remarkable rediscovery of its lost dedication in 2007, St Mary the Virgin's Church gathers nearly a thousand years of remote Sussex history into one small, unrestored building. Cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust and open to all who make the journey, it remains a Grade I listed treasure — a church "movingly eloquent of centuries of remote Sussex agricultural life", standing quietly in its loop of the Arun beneath the Downs.