All Saints Kenton
Grade 1 listed and in the Kenton Conservation Area, the church is thought to date to around 1450-1500, but built on the site of an earlier church. It contains a very fine late medieval rood screen and a pulpit of the same period. The church has been included in England’s Thousand Best Churches by Simon Jenkins for the quality of its late nineteenth and early twentieth century woodcarving. An archaeological survey dating December 2006 revealed walls of two earlier churches and the remains of a mediaeval bell-foundry. A perpendicular styled church with a tall and impressive tower containing six bells, rising about 120 feet, the second tallest in Devon.
The building is 140 feet long and 42 feet wide, with two rows of eight pillars. The interior of the church is made of a nave and chancel with north and south aisles.
It boasts a fifteenth century pulpit ‘hewn out of the trunk of an enormous oak tree’ rescued in 1882 by Rev S Baring Gould from a filthy cupboard and restored with his working drawing taken 31years before by H. Read and F. B. Bond.
The altar dates from 1887 with the tiled pavement, footpace and steps of marble added in 1890. The Reredos depicting the Crucifixion, Entombment and Resurrection was dedicated in 1891.
The Communion Plate includes a pair of chalices dating from 1572, and a flagon given by David Long Esq., High Sheriff of Devon in 1705. The organ built in 1908 by Hele & Co Plymouth.
The Lady Chapel which for over 300 years contained the Oxton Manor House family pew is used as the Lady Chapel which was dedicated by Bishop W. Westall of Crediton in 1954 to the memory of all who gave their lives in the Second World War. It also contains memorials dating from 1628.
The large silver Altar Cross which previously stood on the High Altar in the Exeter Cathedral’s quire now belongs to the Kenton Church. It was given to the Cathedral by the Lumley Memorial Trust in 1923; it was stolen in July 1950, and found the day after the theft. The Charity Commission, the Vicar and Church Councils decided that the memorial cross to be placed above the rood screen in All Saints’ Kenton, which was mounted in 1964.
