The tiny, sleepy village of Bepton in West Sussex is off the beaten track but it’s a charming place with flint barns and some sandstone houses in a gentle landscape north of the South Downs between Petersfield and Petworth. Midhurst is the nearest town of any size.
The church there, St Mary’s, is hidden away too and set apart from the village. This situation gives it a calming, peaceful backdrop amongst the gravestones surrounded by lots of trees and those beautiful downs.
And that, in turn, makes the church at Bepton a little bit suprising. It’s by no means huge but it definitely has proportions slightly incongruous to its setting. Some churches of a similar vintage nearby are less imposing and sturdy. The reasons for this lie with the foundations on which the church is laid.
The confident 20p photocopied guide available in the church stridently asserts that in 480 AD “a Saxon called Babo came here over the Downs, drove out the Celtic inhabitants, and called his settlement Babintone.” Several versions of the name are recorded over the intervening centuries – Babbington, Bebbington, Bebiton, Bebton – with the first recorded use of the name Bepton dating from 1567.
The booklet is equally certain of the church’s origins when it says that in 700 AD St Wilfred’s christian community from Selsea built a wooden church on the site. That structure is recorded in the Domesday book of 1087 with the current stone structure first raised in the last two decades of the 12th century.
This metre thick walls of flint and chalk, however, proved to be too heavy for the soft chalk below and soon the tower started subsiding towards the south west and plans for a taller tower abandoned. Over time, a small bell chamber was added and the result is the solid square squat church that we see today that has changed very little over the centuries. Significant alterations to the interior were made in 1878 including the loss of some Norman features and the addition of the vestry.
What a beautiful church it is too