St Giles' Church has a picturesque setting alongside Shermanbury Place and its parkland, on a low rise above the flood plain of the eastern River Adur.

[5] The mound on which the church and Shermanbury Place stands was doubtless also the site of the Anglo-Saxon burh, or fortification, which gives the village the second half of its name.

In 1586, and again in the 1670s, the church is recorded to have been ill-furnished, but matters seem to have improved under the long-term resident rectorships of Richard Ward, 1677–1706, and John Bear, 1711–62.

[9] In 1751 the classical scholar John Burton visited the church and gave a critical account of the performance of church music in the services: "[T]hey sing psalms, by preference, not set to the old and simple tune, but as if in a tragic chorus, changing about with strophe and antistrophe and stanzas, with good measure, but yet there is something offensive to my ears, when they bellow to excess, and bleat out some goatish noise with all their might.

In the census held on Sunday, 30 March 1851 143 parishioners are recorded to have attended service in the morning, and 170 in the afternoon.

[10] Burials in the church graveyard were discontinued in 1888, and it was replaced by a new cemetery with a small brick chapel on Frylands Lane.

The rendered walls of the nave – there are no aisles – are largely 13th century, and feature on both the north and south sides blocked medieval doorways.

[18][19] St Giles is one of relatively few Sussex churches – others include Warminghurst, East Guldeford, Chiddingly and Penhurst – where box pews still survive.

[20][21] They date from c. 1747, and like the rather later pews of St George's Church, West Grinstead, they carry the names of the local farms to whose use they were appropriated.

The third north window of the nave has heraldic glass made by the well-known firm of James Powell and Sons in 1937.

West Sussex Record Office holds them up to 1990 (christenings), 1995 (marriages), and 1974 (burials), and also microfilms of the bishop's transcripts of those registers from 1606 to 1690.

[25][10] Services are held at St Giles at 11.15 a.m. on the first and third Sundays of every month,[26] but at other times the church is normally closed to visitors.