Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Warminghurst

Warminghurst (from Old English meaning "the high wood of Wyrma's people") is an ancient parish at the south of the Weald, close to where the South Downs rise. It is long from north and south, narrow and largely rural; its village, never very large, has disappeared since the medieval era. Development was always scattered rather than nucleated because the land around the church and manor house sloped steeply away on all sides. One of the earliest descriptions of Warminghurst was as an appurtenance of Steyning, a more significant nearby town, and although the Domesday survey of 1086 mentioned two churches in the latter, one may have been at Warminghurst. A church is known to have stood in the…

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has a simple layout, only slightly altered from its 13th-century origins. It consists of a long, low single cell containing nave and chancel, a porch on the south side (now blocked, and containing the original entrance door), a vestry (formerly a private chapel) on the north side, an entrance in the liturgical west end and a bell-turret topped with a broach spire on the roof at the liturgical east end. The porch and vestry are of brick, but the rest of the building is stone with some protective render in places. is the rare three-deck pulpit, also of the 18th century. The north chapel was built in 1619 by Henry Shelley as a vault and private chapel for the…