The St James wall paintings at Stoke Orchard

Stoke Orchard is a village in the vale below Cleeve Hill, about 4 miles north-west of Cheltenham. Its little church, listed as the Chapel of St James the Great, once a chapel of ease to Bishop's Cleeve, is listed Grade I (opens in a new tab). The nave was probably built around 1170.

The paintings

Around the walls at window height runs a cycle of 28 scenes from the life of St James, the saint of Compostela, painted between about 1190 and 1220 and framed with decorative borders. They are fragmentary, but the listing calls the cycle the only one of its kind in England, and their style has been compared with the carvings of the Herefordshire School at Kilpeck.

Later centuries painted over them: fifteenth-century patterns, a standing figure and the feet of what is thought to have been St Christopher, sixteenth-century texts, seventeenth-century borders and a crowned rose, and eighteenth-century texts, royal arms and figures of Death and Time. The medieval cycle was restored in 1953 to 1955, and the eighteenth-century figures on the west wall are now largely gone.

The Cotswolds Info newsletter

Events, new places and the best of the season, about once a month. Unsubscribe at any time.

Leave this field blank

Your name

Your email address

Yes, send me the Cotswolds Info newsletter

Sign me up

Visiting

The Church of England's listing gives no opening times and asks visitors to contact the church (the priest in charge, 01452 780880), so check before you make a special trip; the church's postcode is GL52 7SH. It is a short drive from Winchcombe and Cheltenham.