Anglican church of St Thomas, Melbury Abbas.
"A church has stood on this site for perhaps a thousand years. Melbury Abbas as the Second half of the name suggests was owned by the great Abbey, the Benedictine nunnery of Shaftesbury, founded by Alfred the Greatin 888 AD. He made his daughter the first Abbess. The first firm evidence of a Christian ministry here is of one Eilan, priest of Melbury in a document of 1150 AD. He is described as dependent on the generosity of the people since there was no farm or glebe.
At some point a stone church was built and a building survived until 1852, though it was then in bad repair. We know it had a tower with three bells, at least one transept, and a west door. It was demolished and the present church, a larger building took its place on the same ancient site. It cost Sir Richard Glyn, the patron, who owned nearly the whole village, £2500.00. On 21st December 1852 the Bishop of Salisbury dedicated the new church to St Thomas, whose feast day it then was. The Rector, Henry T Glyn, a member of the patron's family, and many clergy assisted in a long ceremony.
a well proportioned Christian shrine of Victorian Gothic, derived from the architecture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It is one of the many churches in North Dorset restored or rebuilt by the Victorian reformers. The same architect, George Evans, built a church in nearby Compton Abbas.
The church looks largely as it would have done at its opening except that the lighting and heating are of course modern.
It consists of a south entrance porch, through which you have just come, a nave with a three stage tower at the south-west end, a chancel and sanctuary, a small vestry on the north side, a north and south transept (the latter partly concealed by the organ) and a south aisle.
The main structure is built of Shaftesbury green, a greensandstone which varies in colour from one bed to the next, quarried a quarter of a mile north and west along Quarry Lane, in a field belonging to Manor Farm. It is a soft stone, but here of good quality and cut thickly enough to avoid the use of iron clamps to hold stones together. (Clamps were used in some churches and they rust, causing much trouble). Between the outer skin of the best hand cut ashlar and the inner skin is rubble, perhaps from the old church. The inner skin was rendered and limewashed. The Victorians used a lime mortar from one of the many lime pits in the parish. Lime mortar is better than the cement mortar used in recent times to patch up the pointing.
The dressing stone for windows and doors is the yellowish Bath stone. Altogether there is a good deal of it, notably in the chancel arch. The Bath stone, even outside, has worn well but some of the sandstone has shaled and a new surface is to be formed by a limewater technique to avoid the necessity of replacing damaged stones."
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