Kinwarton

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Kinwarton is a village in the valley of the River Alne, Warwickshire, finding itself today being steadily encroached upon by the spread of nearby Alcester.

There was once a large village here, and tucked away down a road by the old toll house is the tiny (57 feet long) parish church of St. Mary, of Saxon origins, rebuilt in 1316, and consecrated then by the Bishop of Worcester. The weather-boarded turret dates from the sixteenth century; inside there is some glass of two centuries earlier, a fifteenth-century sculpted alabaster panel of 'Our Lady' found in a carpenter's shop at Binton in 1836, and now a memorial to a former rector. There is also a memorial to a Royal Air Force Squadron Leader shot down over France in 1944. The rectory is a Georgian red-brick house of 1788. Trees surround the church and churchyard, from which can be seen the open countryside. Not far distant, to the north, are Coughton and Sambourne.

Not far from the church is Glebe Farm with its seventeenth-century square timber-framing, on land forming part of a manor given to the abbots of Evesham by the King of Mercia in 708, and recorded in the Domesday Book. North of the church, on old glebe land, stands Kinwarton Dovecote, a circular dovecote built in the fourteenth century for the abbots, its lantern being added three centuries later. It contains over 500 nesting boxes, and is one of the few dovecotes still surviving in Warwickshire. It is now the property of the National Trust.