The Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the South Somerset village of Isle Abbotts. The monarch of the Levels.

For the last of this series of Christmas posts on churches I thought I would visit the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Isle Abbotts in South Somerset.  It seemed an appropriate finale as Simon Jenkins, in his England’s Thousand Best Churches (Penguin Books, 2009), states: “Isle Abbotts is the monarch of the Somerset Levels.”   He also includes it in his list of the Top Hundred.

I took the B3168 north from Ilminster and, after crossing the A303, turned off left at Old Way Gate onto Cad Road and followed the signposts to Ilton.  Heading north out of Ilton I passed the Royal Naval Air Station at Merryfield and was soon driving along some very narrow, muddy, icy lanes toward the village of Isle Abbotts. 

I parked in a lane 50 yards from the Church.  It was a clear bright winter’s day but, although it was noon, the sun had not thawed the ice on the shaded puddles; it was still nearly half an inch thick from the previous night’s heavy frost.

Edward Hutton in his Highways & Byways in Somerset (Macmillan & Co., 1912) wrote of St. Mary the Virgin: “Isle Abbots I could not miss, for its beautiful double-windowed church tower, though small, is one of the finest in Somerset . . . The beauty of the tower among the trees is extraordinary; its details are exquisite and then it has this major advantage that nearly all its niches retain their figures, and these are numerous.”*

The Church of St. Mary the Virgin in the South Somerset village of Isle Abbotts.

Only one mile to the east of Isle Abbotts, across the River Isle, is the village of Isle Brewers which I visited last summer.  Its parish church of All Saints is a complete contrast to St. Mary the Virgin but is pretty enough in its own way.

A summer view of the parish church of All Saints in Isle Brewers, South Somerset.

In his Somerset (Great Western Railway Company) 1934, Maxwell Fraser writes of the two neighbouring churches: “Isle Brewers- its name is a corruption of the De Bruyeres who once owned the manor- is a little village whose church, rebuilt in 1861 but retaining a Norman font, is completely overshadowed by the splendid church of Isle Abbots, once the property of the Abbots of Muchelney.”*

*Note the older spelling of “Abbots” used by Hutton and Fraser.