Geograph - photograph every grid square

Written by Brian Robert Marshall
The church has been listed Grade I since 1966 Link It has a 15th century tower although its origins are some 200 years earlier. There was an even earlier church hereabouts dating to 996 AD which was recorded in the Domesday Book but no trace remains. The nave is Norman but was rebuilt in the mid 15th century around the same time as the tower was built. The transepts were added in ca 1325. The church contains a number of floor- and wall-mounted brasses. There is also an ancient lead font which may date to as early as 1175. It features the embossed figures of twelve bishops dressed in chasubles. The single-handed clock on the tower dates to 1763 and until as recently as 1985 was wound manually every day. Mechanisation has taken over the task. There are memorials within to soldiers who died in the Great War including a brass plaque commemorating the Fallen who were members of the Old Berkshire Hunt. An unusual such memorial is a German-made cross that marked the grave of a British Officer born in Childrey who died in battle in France in 1914 and who was buried by his enemies. Another curiosity is the presence of ‘squints’, openings through the wall of a church in an oblique direction, to enable the worshippers in the transepts or other parts of the church, from which the altar was not visible, to see the elevation of the host. The squint in the north transept is set too high for this to be the case and its true purpose remains unclear.