St Mary Magdalene's Church
Description
This Norman Church is where Will Adams (The first Westerner to visit Japan) was christened on 24th September 1564. Although it's still an operating church, as seems to be the trend it has had most of its cemetery converted to a children's playground and a housing estate for the elderly.
Other
local figures linked to the church are the Featherby family, of whom John Robert Featherby was the first mayor of the Borough of Gillingham in 1901.
The Featherby family tomb, marked by a tall grey stone on a covering stone which is now missing its original railings, is near the middle of the churchyard, and can be seen on the left
of this picture:
Visit this page for more detailed photographs and details of the inscriptions.
The churchyard also contains the tomb of
Sir William Pearce, Baronet, and his family. Theirs is the pink granite tomb just to the right of the centre of this photograph:
Although most of the graves have been cleared away, many are still standing. The following are a selection of photographs of some of the more distinctive gravestones and tombs in the churchyard.
