Church of St Mary

The parish church of Ottery St Mary is one of the finest medieval churches in Devon, and one of the best-preserved examples of 14th-century English collegiate architecture anywhere in the country. It was built between 1337 and 1342 by Bishop John de Grandisson of Exeter, who modelled it deliberately on Exeter Cathedral — using the same masons and the same architectural vocabulary but compressing the full cathedral programme into a parish-church scale.

The interior is remarkable: a vaulted nave, carved stone screens, and the extraordinary painted wooden ceiling of the nave with its gilded bosses at each vault intersection. The Bishop's Grandisson Chapel contains exceptional carved woodwork from the 14th century. The working astronomical clock on the north transept wall is one of the few surviving medieval clocks in England. The churchyard contains the grave of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's family; Coleridge himself, the poet and opium dreamer, was born in the town in 1772.

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The church's astronomical clock, dating from the 14th century, is one of only two surviving medieval astronomical clocks in Devon, the other being at Exeter Cathedral — which is not a coincidence, since Ottery's church was built to imitate Exeter's. The clock still works, driven by its original mechanism, and tells not only the time but also the phases of the moon and the position of the sun in the zodiac. It was built to help monks calculate the correct times for the canonical hours of prayer, when mechanical timekeeping was otherwise unavailable.