Tithe records show that Hampton Gay had a parish church by 1074, although there are different opinions as to how much of the original medieval structure survives. The original church had features from at least the early thirteenth century but in 1767-72 The Rev’d Thomas Hindes, a member of the family that owned the manor, had it completely rebuilt.

In 1842 the antiquarian J H Parker condemned the Georgian architecture of St Giles’ Church as ‘a very bad specimen of the meeting-house style’ (Parker, Church Guide, 1956). In 1859-60 the curate, The Rev’d F C Hingeston, altered the church to his own designs, replacing the round-headed Georgian windows with ones in an Early English Gothic style and by having the south doorway re-cut in a Norman revival fashion (this door no longer exists).

The remaining Georgian features are the gallery, the coved and panelled ceiling, the stone ball finial on the roof, and the weathervane.

St Giles’ contains several monuments, most of them to the Barry family. A seventeenth-century wall monument with kneeling effigies of Vincent and Anne Barry and their daughter, Lady Katherine Fenner, is the most notable.

St Giles’ is an unusual church in several ways. The village of Hampton Gay has all but disappeared, leaving only the church, the ruins of the Elizabethan manor house, and a few houses. The church sits surrounded by fields between the manor house and the railway. It has a minstrels’ gallery but no water or electricity. This gives the building a wonderfully atmospheric feel for its winter candlelit services.

We are currently undertaking a programme of restoration and repair.  St Giles’ is a Grade 2* listed building.

St Giles’ Church is also of interest owing to Hampton Gay’s role in the Shipton-on-Cherwell train crash, also known as the Oxford Train Wreck.  34 people died and 69 people were seriously injured when a completely full Great Western Railway passenger train derailed in snowy conditions in the early hours of Christmas Eve 1874.  The accident – in which carriages were propelled across a field and others into the Oxford Canal – happened close to the village of Hampton Gay.  Staff from Hampton Gay’s paper mill heard the crash and rushed to assist the dead and injured, and the large manor house was used as a base of operation during the inquest.  The paper mill was destroyed by fire in 1875, and the manor house burnt down in 1887, never to be rebuilt.  Only its ruins and St Giles’ Church remain.