Located about three miles west of Salisbury, the ancient town of Wilton was, for hundreds of years, the administrative centre for the county to which it also gives its name. It is, for all appearances, a beautiful, traditional, English market town…except when it comes to the parish church, for when you process down the high street, you catch a glimpse of…no, that can’t be right…Italy? The last thing the unsuspecting tourist expects to see in a sleepy corner of Wiltshire is a slice of Tuscany, but that is exactly what greets you on arrival; a rich, highly unusual, Italianate basilica appears to have teleported itself onto Wilton high street! How did a small market town gain such an interesting structure? And what of the bells? Read on to find out!
During the mid-19th century, the medieval parish church of St Mary was structurally failing, and the decision was taken to abandon it and replace it with a new structure on a new site. Financed by the Dowager Countess of Pembroke, who resided at nearby Wilton House, the building of a new church cost an astronomical £20,000 upon its completion in 1845. It was constructed in the richest Italianate style as a copy of the many basilicas of Tuscany; the Dowager’s son Sidney spent much of his time there and greatly admired the architecture.
The exterior is impressive, with an imposing west facade facing the shops, featuring a richly decorated gable including a rose window, many rows of niches for statues, and moulded doorways. The crowning glory of the exterior, however, is the tall, thin, campanile, which rises to 108 feet (33 metres) above the ground. The campanile is very close to a detached tower, connected to the north nave aisle by a thin cloister, itself extravagantly decorated despite not being seen by most of the congregation. The interior is no less impressive, with black marble columns taken from the Temple of Venus dating to the 2nd century BC, and the oldest stained glass in the country within the central window of the eastern apse, taken from the Cathedral of Saint-Denis in Paris.
The Bells
So what of the bells? When the old church was abandoned, the bells from it were installed in the new during the 1840s. The history of these bells has not been well documented, but it appears that the three bells recorded in Edward VI’s 1552 Church Goods Inventory were at some point augmented and recast into a ring of six, certainly by the winter of 1831-182, when Thomas Mears of Whitechapel recast all the bells again. With a tenor of 8 and 3/4 cwt, the bells were right at the size limit the new tower could accommodate. Indeed, they had to be rehung into two tiers, with the even-numbered bells below the odd. With the bells hung high in this very tall, very thin, and mostly unbuttressed tower, combined with the ringing room being near the bottom, not only was there a considerable amount of rope between the bells and the ringers, but the tower movement must have made them difficult to ring.
H. B. Walters, in his 1929 survey, The Church Bells of Wiltshire, noted that the bells were not in good condition. There were only two peals on Mears’s ring of six in the new church, Grandsire Doubles in October 1945, and Cambridge Surprise Minor in October 1969, before they were deemed unringable in 1982. It was not until the arrival of a new rector in 1986 that the restoration of the bells was added to a ‘to-do list’, but the project launch would have to wait until 1994 when the Mayor launched an appeal. Whitechapel’s tender to recast and rehang the bells was accepted, and following an inspection of the tower itself, which revealed it needed repairs, the appeal target rose to £75,000.
As the appeal progressed, however, there was a snag: the church had accepted an English Heritage grant some years before, and they had to be consulted on the project proposals. They insisted that the old fittings and frame were retained in the tower, even if the bells themselves were recast or rehoused elsewhere. This required a redesign of the proposed installation by Whitechapel, with the appeal target now approaching £100,000. The Millennium Fund provided just over £53,000 of the total cost, with local effort providing the majority of the remainder. A new ring of six bells was cast and tuned at Whitechapel during 1998 and was ready to ring by the August of that year. The new installation was a rare example of Whitechapel’s cast iron ‘H’ frame castings, with the treble, 3rd, 5th and tenor hung in a high-sided frame lower in the tower, and the 2nd and 4th in a low-sided frame above them. The old wooden frames remain, complete with wheels, stays, headstocks and sliders, some considerable distance above the bells. There are thus four frames in the tower, stretching over 30 feet above the ringing chamber. Initially, the bells were too loud for the ringers and not loud enough outside, an issue which has since been addressed. The tenor weighs 8-0-7, and the ring is in the key of A major.
The old ring of bells was transferred, minus the fittings, to St Andrew’s Church in Lismore, New South Wales, following a two-year effort by the Keltek Trust. The bells were retuned and hung on new fittings by Whitechapel, later being augmented to eight in 2003. Ringing at Lismore was suspended between 2022 and 2024 due to storm damage, but the bells are now ringable again as of the writing of this article. With the distance between Wilton and Lismore being some 10,400 miles, not only is this a potential record for how far a ring of bells has been transferred, but a slice of the Salisbury Guild still exists in New South Wales.
Jack Pease
