St Mary's Church has no spire. Where you'd expect one, the western tower stops flat, topped with a stone balustrade and four urns, and that's it — which is odd enough on its own before you learn the rest. It stands right next to Ingestre Hall, and it is the only church outside London attributed to Sir Christopher Wren, an attribution that rests on a single drawing found among Wren's papers, labelled "Mr Chetwynd's tower".
The Chetwynd in question was Sir Walter Chetwynd, an antiquary and Royal Society Fellow who knew Wren through the Society and had him rebuild the parish church after the old one fell into decay from "rough usage" during the Civil War. Work started in 1673 and the church was consecrated in August 1677.
Inside, the pulpit and tester are carved by Grinling Gibbons, peapod motif and all, and the plaster ceiling — inscribed with the names "Gilbert and S Hand" — is good enough that Pevsner simply called it "gorgeous". Harry Mount, writing in The Spectator, put it more extravagantly: "This fine church of the 1670s was indeed the work of the architect of St Paul's Cathedral... the City of London in Staffordshire – and it's heaven on earth!"
Ingestre itself is a hamlet of around 194 people, and it has no pub and no shop. The nearest hospitality on the estate is The Orangery, which does weddings rather than lunches, so anyone staying nearby should plan on driving the four miles into Stafford for a proper meal or a food shop. What Ingestre does have is Ingestre Park Golf Club, an 18-hole parkland course rebuilt in 2022 within the grounds of the Hall, with a driving range, clubhouse and pro shop, and the shared Tixall & Ingestre Village Hall, which runs coffee mornings and children's parties.
Walking is the other draw. A circular route from the Punch Bowl car park runs through woodland, joins the Staffordshire Way across the Shugborough Estate, crosses the Essex Bridge, and picks up the Trent & Mersey Canal towpath before looping back along the Staffordshire & Worcestershire Canal to Tixall Wide, passing the sixteenth-century Tixall Gatehouse. In Ingestre Wood, on a vista cut by Capability Brown down to the River Trent, sits Ingestre Pavilion — a 1752 picnic folly rescued by the Landmark Trust in 1988, which now lets as a holiday cottage.
The Hall next door was built in red brick in 1613, rebuilt after a fire in 1882, and is now a council-run arts centre, closed to the public, hosting residential arts courses for children and young people. Brown landscaped the park from 1756 — one of his first commissions, six years into his career, with seventy men working the grounds within a year.
The Domesday Book records the place as "In Gestreon": eleven households, four ploughlands, and an annual value to the lord of fifteen shillings. Stafford station is four or five miles off, the A51 and A518 pass nearby, and there's no confirmed local bus route, so a car is the practical way in and out.
On the day St Mary's was consecrated in 1677, the Bishop performed a baptism, a churching, a wedding and a burial, all in the one afternoon — which is a lot to ask of a new building, and about as good a proof as any that it was built to be a working parish church, not a private chapel for the Hall next door.
