St Peter's and St Paul's Church, Holsworthy

The Church of St Peter and St Paul presides over Holsworthy, the small market town in the rolling Ruby Country of west Devon, close to the Cornish border. A Grade II* listed building, it is the parish church of a town that still keeps its weekly cattle market and ancient fairs, and its fabric records nearly nine hundred years of continuous rebuilding on one spot.

The first building here was probably a Norman oratory of about 1130, a small church occupying the site of the present nave. Around 1250 it was demolished and replaced by a church with tower, nave, south aisle and chancel in the Early English style, altered and enlarged in 1366. The Norman building was not entirely lost: its remnants were carefully gathered into the south porch, where visitors can still find a Norman capital surmounted by a carved Agnus Dei panel — thought to be the centre of the old tympanum — two Norman colonnettes with Romanesque capitals flanking the doorway, and a carved holy water stoup, all beneath a Norman-style zigzag arch added in 1883. Traces of the oratory's rubble walls remain visible inside, near the tower.

Medieval Holsworthy had its own chantry story. In the fourteenth century Walter le Deneis — "the Danish Man", of the Dennis family who held the manors of Pancrasweek, Manworthy and Trewyn — founded a chantry chapel at Trewyn, half a mile north of the church, endowing its priests for two hundred years to say daily Mass for his family's souls. Around 1450 the chantry was incorporated into the church, probably in the south aisle, and the last chantry priest was appointed in 1524, on the eve of the Reformation that would sweep such foundations away.

The church owes its present appearance to a thorough late-Victorian renovation by the Launceston architect Otho Bathurst Peter. The chancel was completely rebuilt in 1881–82; in 1883 the nave, south aisle and porch were rebuilt and a north aisle, organ chamber and vestry added — all in the Early English style of the original, using local stone with Hatherleigh stone for buttresses and dressings and Corsham Bath stone within. The fourteenth century survives in the south arcade, whose four pointed arches stand on massive octagonal piers (raised two feet in 1883). The rebuilt chancel is floored with Maw & Co encaustic tiles beneath a panelled oak wagon roof, with eighteen carved oak angels mounted on stone brackets below the wall-plate. Its glass of 1883 includes an Ascension east window and windows of the Good Samaritan and the church's patron saints by Lavers and Westlake, with a Virgin Mary lancet by Drake of Exeter given by the deanery clergy. The oak reredos of about 1926, carved in fifteenth-century style by Herbert Read of Exeter and gilded in 1968, depicts St Peter amid shields bearing eight symbols of the Passion — hammer and pliers, the five wounds, cloak and dice, ladder, sponge and spear, nails and crown of thorns, scourging pillar, the tribute money, and the sword with Malchus's ear. The north aisle became a Lady Chapel in the mid-twentieth century, and the carved oak pulpit of 1910 has a touching provenance: given in memory of John Aspinall by his sisters, its carving was the work of Miss Ethel Mary Aspinall herself.

The mid-fifteenth-century west tower rises 85¾ feet in three crenellated stages with four crocketed pinnacles. Its clock — first mentioned in the churchwardens' accounts of 1690 — was renewed in 1869 by the Gillett and Bland Steam Clock Factory of Croydon, with Westminster chimes added in 1873; once wound daily by hand through three separate movements, it is now electric. The bells grew from three in 1553 to five in 1727, until in 1826 a full octave by Thomas Mears II of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry was installed, funded by subscription through the "persevering exertions" of Francis Thorne and his nephew, with bells given by the family of the late rector Owen Lewis Meyrick, by Sir Humphrey Davie and by Philip Henry, Earl Stanhope. In 1949 all eight were recast heavier by Gillett & Johnston of Croydon, rehung in a steel frame with a new carillon, and rededicated by the Bishop of Exeter.

The organ carries the most romantic pedigree of all: said to be the work of the great Restoration builder Renatus Harris, it came from Chelsea Old Church in London, was moved to Bideford in 1723, and arrived in Holsworthy in 1865, where Geek and Sons of Launceston restored and enlarged it for its reopening in 1867 — played by W. B. Gilbert of London, "one of the best organists of the day". Renovated again in 1883–84 and overhauled in 1926, it still leads the worship of a parish whose story runs unbroken from Norman oratory to market-town benefice.