England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Wormshill St Giles

The Parish

The parish of Wormshill lies in north central Kent about 5 miles south of the market town of Sittingbourne. Wormshill sits in an area almost devoid of numbered major road about 3 miles north of the A20 which connects London with Ashford & Folkestone and roughly midway between the modern communications of the M2 and M20. Wormshill is a linear community built along "The Street" a lane running northeast to southwest along a low ridge of land. At the time of this transcript Wormshill would have been a farming community practicing a mixed regime of arable and pastoral farming with patches of wooded copses breaking up the landscape, today arable dominates as heavy machinery makes working the soils more practicable. There is little surface drainage visible on current maps but land falls away to the northeast to the coastal plain eventually reaching the Thames Estuary through Milton Creek and Sittingbourne. Wormshill is sited at around 150 metres above the sea with the southern end some 10 metres or so higher, as stated it sits on a low ridge which rises to local heights of almost 200 metres within a couple of miles. Wormshill parish was fairly typically sized for the area, where many small parishes reside, it covered just under 1,500 acres and would have supported a population of around 200 parishioners. In Domesday times Wormshill was one of the many possessions of Bishop Odo of Bayeux, a tiny place of just 2 ploughs, a small meadow and some woodland.

The Church

St Giles' church sits at the northern end of the community on a sharp right-angled bend in The Street and on the eastern side of the latter. Much of the church dates from the early English Gothic period of the early 13th century but Pevsner is quick to point out the double-splayed window of the nave south side which is Saxon in design and pushes the dating of the building back to the pre-Conquest era. That there was a major rebuild in the 13th century is clearly demonstrated by the use of lancet windows throughout elsewhere. In common with most churches the Victorians also made their mark restoring (badly over-restored says Pevsner) in the late 1870s to result in today's church. The church sits behind a low flint wall topped by brick and faces across open pastures. A wooden gateway and gravel path lead to the building in a relatively open and obstruction-free churchyard.