England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Ifield St Margaret

The Parish

The parish of Ifield lies in northern Kent roughly 3 miles southeast of the port of Gravesend. Ifield sits immediately south of the busy A2 road which links London with Canterbury. There is very little to modern day Ifield, Pevsner calls it "strangely lonely", a few cottages, the early 19th mansion of Ifield Court and a church amid fields in one of the smallest parishes in its county. Ifield Court has an extensive orchard but the main crop within the parish would have been cereals. Modern developments have come aplenty to Ifield, a row of pylons masks the deep cutting in which the newly built high-speed railway, part of the London to Paris line, passes through the parish, beyond it sits the A2 now upgraded to a modern fast dual-carriageway highway. Around Ifield there is a distinct lack of surface drainage, water making its way the couple of miles to the nearby outer Thames estuary largely by sub-surface means. Ifield is sited at around 60 metres above the sea, land rises as a fore-plain southwards towards the North Downs range reaching 134 metres at nearby Meopham. At just 312 acres Ifield parish was not only one of the smallest rural parishes in its county but in the land, despite that tiny acreage it would have supported a population, at one time much fewer today. of around 150 parishioners. Ifield is not mentioned in Domesday Book.

The Church

St Margaret's church sits to the northeast of Ifield Court on the eastern side of Church Road and barely yards from the high-speed railway line. Whilst the church undoubtedly has its origins in the earliest times, some sources suggest a 12th century Norman Romanesque origin, much of the fabric dates from a major restoration conducted not in Victorian times but in a rather unusual time period that of the late 16th century. This time of religious turbulence is not one normally associated with church building but here it clearly was. A simple church of nave and lower chancel is enhanced by its white-painted weather-boarded spirelet that graces the western end. Further repairs followed in 1638 before another restoration of 1845 left little of the medieval behind for us to view, Pevsner points to a low-side window on the southern face as a lonely medieval survivor. Whilst Church Road is narrow it is widened by the church to provide off-road parking by the churchyard entrance. The churchyard, itself is open, uncluttered and with no obstacles for the photographer.