St Mary Magdalene's Church, Tortington

Tortington is an ancient manor and parish next to the River Arun in West Sussex. The ecclesiastical parish was originally shaped like an inverted triangle, but many boundary changes took place over the centuries. As well as the manor – mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 – there was a medieval Augustinian monastery, Tortington Priory. An agricultural hamlet had developed by the 12th century, and its layout and function have changed little since then. A church was first mentioned in the mid-12th century, when there was a rectory. The doorway survive from that era (both have been dated to 1140), and the layout and fabric of the church are still largely 12th-century despite subsequent…

]] St Mary Magdalene's Church has a nave, a narrower chancel, a vestry on the north side accessed from the nave, a south aisle with an arcade, a timber bell-turret and a roof of clay tiles which slopes steeply as a catslide over the aisle. Flint and stone rubble are the main building materials; there are quoins of Caen stone. The latter are rare in Sussex – only St Mary's Church at Broadwater and St Mary de Haura Church at Shoreham-by-Sea have similar designs. Nikolaus Pevsner describes the carvings as "keeping inside the established pattern" of such work, and not displaying the "extraordinary ... [simultaneously] mannered and extrovert" details of the carved doorway at St Mary's Church at…