St Mary Magdalene

The parish of Peckleton comprises a rural hamlet mostly on a single road plus surrounding farms and former Tooley Park estate buildings and it numbers 110 houses in all. The church has excellent acoustics, especially for orchestral and chamber music and the spoken word and consequently hosts a summer concert season.

The church has many features in Decorated Style, plus 15th & 16th century alterations; major restorations in 1869 raised the nave roof and chancel floor. A 12th century font has a later cylindrical pedestal. The west tower has six bells (gifted in 1713 by Thomas Boothby, who is thought to be the model for Squire Booby in Henry Fielding's novel 'Joseph Andrews’), surmounted by a spire. The nave has a south aisle with 16th century clerestories and Victorian north and south porches.

The stained glass comprises two small panels of 14th century fragments in the chancel picturing the Abbess of Polesworth and St Michael (with the pieces misaligned) and the 1894 east window by Charles Kempe with signature haysheaves. Above the tower arch is a hatchment of the arms of Queen Victoria, presented in 1863.

Monuments include a late 13th century female effigy and a slightly later effigy of a knight wearing chain armour, with the effigy of a lady with wimple headdress beside him. On the north wall of the chancel is the incised alabaster top from an early 16th century chest tomb showing Sir Thomas Harvey in full plate armour flanked by his two (consecutive) wives while the side of this chest tomb, with an arcade containing figures, is incorporated into the west wall of the south aisle. Tablets on the south chancel wall are to the Reverend William Wood, died 1814, and Robert Chessher, the first British orthopaedist and very famous in his day, who died in 1831. Behind the altar is a tomb effigy of a face only, slightly spooky!

The churchyard is open and contains a Grade II listed tomb (Henry Bickley) and also the grave of the rally driver, Roger Clark.