St Martin's Church, Bladon
— — the churchyard where Churchill was carried home.
Not only on a wall.
“A small parish church in Bladon, a village at the southern edge of the Blenheim Palace grounds. The churchyard holds the grave of Winston Churchill, his wife Clementine, and most of the Spencer-Churchill family. Visitors come quietly. There is a path through the yews, a low Cotswold-stone wall, and a view across the Oxfordshire fields toward Woodstock.
St Martin's Church, Bladon, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
St Martin's stands at the western edge of Bladon, a village of fewer than a thousand people in West Oxfordshire, about three miles west of Woodstock and a short walk from the southern boundary of the Blenheim Palace estate. The present church was largely rebuilt in 1891 on the foundations of an earlier 1804 chapel, which itself replaced a medieval building serving the parish. It belongs to the Diocese of Oxford and the parish of Blenheim, and is most often visited for the family graves at the eastern end of its churchyard.
The walls are built of Cotswold limestone, the honey-brown rubblestone quarried across the Oxfordshire uplands and used at nearby Woodstock and across the Blenheim estate. The 1891 rebuild kept the tower from the earlier 1804 chapel, so the masonry reads in two registers: the older lower stage weathered nearly grey, the Victorian upper work still carrying its first warm colour. A short churchyard path of the same stone runs from the south porch out to the Churchill family plot, edged by clipped yew and a low boundary wall.
The church is open daily and there is no entry fee. Most visitors come for the grave of Sir Winston Churchill, who was buried here on 30 January 1965 after a state funeral at St Paul's Cathedral. His wife Clementine joined him in 1977, and several other members of the Spencer-Churchill family lie alongside, in a simple plot marked by upright stones rather than a monument. A small donations box inside the porch supports the upkeep of the building and the churchyard, which receives many thousands of visitors a year.