The present St Mary's Church is located in the centre of the small village of Clophill, between Bedford and Luton in the county of Bedfordshire in the South Midlands of England.

It acquired first local, then more widespread, notoriety in the 1960s, as a result of the desecration of a number of the church's graves, with the attendant sensationalist suspicions of Satanism and black masses.

Those plans proved too expensive for the council; instead, in 2012 a new project was announced, which included stabilising the existing ruin and providing a viewing platform on the top of the tower, besides building a heritage centre next to the church.

2, edited by Page, "The churchyard possessed the unenviable reputation of being a haunt of body snatchers, and many human bones have been dug up in the fields of Brickwall Farm".

The youths claimed that they had taken it from inside St Mary's, where they had discovered it stuck on a broken piece of window frame that had been jammed into a wall.

On the floor were a breastbone, pelvis and leg bones laid "in the pattern used for the Black Mass", as it was described in newspaper reports of police statements.

Scattered cockerel feathers and tracings of two Maltese crosses infilled in red, one newly done and the other somewhat weatherworn, were found inside the church.

Leslie Barker, reported that six graves of females had been tampered with before the stone slab above a seventh, that of Jenny Humberstone who had died in 1770 aged 22, had been dislodged and the coffin broken open.

[6][5] Barker, speaking to the press, stated that "Satan worshippers are known to always use a female at the centre of their ceremonies", and his churchwarden ascribed the damage to "some kind of devil worship".

[6] Author and researcher Bill Ellis, writing some years later, opined that the police's idea of a "sacrificial cockerel" had been derived from a scene in Denis Wheatley's 1934 novel The Devil Rides Out, where a black cock and white hen are sacrificed.

The discovery of the heads of six cows and a horse in Bluebell Wood, Caddington, south of Luton, on 9 April was linked to the desecration at St Mary's, fueling further interest.

The church and the reputation that it had gained from the incident were mentioned in a coffee-table book on witchcraft by the folklorist Eric Maple, who described "desolate Clophill" with a "wilderness of desecrated and looted tombs, symbols of the revival of black magic in the twentieth century", and recommended that people visit it for a "truly Gothic experience".

[6] The desecration of St Mary's in 1963 was followed by a spate of similar newspaper reports of "black magic rites" in churches in 1963 and 1964, including reports of a series of desecrations in Lancashire, symbols painted on the porch of a church in Bramber, Sussex, and a pentagram and a sheep's heart pierced with thirteen thorns in St Clement's in Leigh-on-Sea.

It was proposed to convert it into a bothy to provide overnight accommodation for walkers on the Bedfordshire Greensand Ridge walk, with a full-time warden on site.

[3] Built by Smith & Appleford of Pimlico, the Clophill church was constructed out of brown sandstone in rubble courses, with details in Portland stone.

In total, with the exception of the south aisle and the sandstone that were donated by the then parish rector J. Mendham and Earl de Grey respectively, the building cost £2,300 (equivalent to £300,000 in 2023).

"[25] Today the parish church is part of the benefice of Campton, Clophill and Haynes, in deanery of Ampthill and Shefford, and the archdeaconry of Bedford.