St. Martha’s
ST. MARTHA'S Chapel, a well-known landmark for all the countryside, standing upon the top of a ridge of Greensand Although called a chapel, it seems always to have possessed the rights of a parish church; and it is pr
obably to be identified with one of the three churches mentioned in Doomsday as standing on the manor of Bramley, then held by Bishop Odo of Bayeux,
Who may well have built the original of the present building? The site itself is an extremely ancient one, and several circular earthworks still remain on St. Martha's Hill.
The building as we now see it is largely of modern date, an object-lesson of the mischievous results of fanciful restoration, the nave, which had long lain in ruins, being rebuilt in a pseudo-'Norman' style, and the chancel and transept largely reconstructed in 1848. The chancel and transepts had remained intact until about 1846, although the nave was a roofless ruin, and only fragments of the large west tower existed; but in that year part of the roof fell in and services were suspended.
The then Lord Loraine co-operated with two other neighbouring county gentlemen, Mr. H. Currie, of West Horsley, and Mr. R. A. C. Godwin Austen, of Shalford, to rebuild the ruined nave and restore the eastern limb, the last fragments of the western tower being at the same time removed. This tower, which seems to have been very massive and large, is shown in ruins in the engraving published in Grose's Antiquities, from a sketch taken in 1763, it having been thrown down by a severe explosion at the Chilworth gunpowder factories in that year. This view shows part of the vault (apparently a plain quadripartite one without ribs) as then existing, and beneath is a circular square edged arch opening into the nave.
The simple character of this arch, which was devoid of ornament except for a chamfered impost at the springing, suggests that it may have been part of Bishop Odo's work of the last decades of the 11th century; and a small round-headed window in the south wall of the nave, shown in Cracklow's view of 1824,
