St Mary's Church, Market Drayton

St Mary's Church, Market Drayton, stands on the top of a prominent outcrop of red sandstone rock above the River Tern.

[1] The Domesday Book of 1086 mentions "a Priest in Drayton", and there was likely a wooden Anglo-Saxon church on the same site prior to the construction of the present Norman stone building, which dates to 1150.

At one time the current organ blocked the view of the altar, but the pipes have since been moved to behind the reredos and the console to the north side of the chancel.

Early in the 14th century the doorway was incorporated into the superstructure; the large west window above the door features ornate and elaborately patterned stonework typical of the period.

It has a huge brass memorial tablet unveiled after the First World War and a set of kneelers bearing service badges of the regiments in which those commemorated served.

To the right of the main chancel arch are plaques to Major Charles Egerton Hugh Harding (died 1917) and Second Lieutenant John Alberic Everard Upton (killed in the Battle of the Somme 1916), while on the chancel's south wall is a plaque to Lieutenant Charles Henry Lycett Warren, killed at the Siege of Lucknow in 1857.