The church stands on a terrace above the down-sloping street. You can get to it either by a path up at the left corner or, lower down, an open doorway under the church hall.
     There is a sad story about this spot. In 1944, when preparations were being made for the Normandy invasion, American troops were billeted in Lyme, blacks in this eastern side and whites in the west. The tough-guy film star James Cagney arrived to entertain them all in the Marine Theatre, so blacks and whites were both allowed to attend. Afterwards a black soldier found himself being followed back up Church Street by two white soldiers. He tried to hide in this porch, but they came in after him and stabbed him to death. This was the only such brawl that ended in a death.
     From the street-level porch, twenty steps ascend inside the stone embankment, to a path along the terrace front. The fence on the other side of this path consists of upright gravestones.
     A church may well have been sited on this prominent ground, between the river and the bay, in Saxon times, and the existing building is Norman, from the twelfth century.
     The interior starts interestingly with two successive porches which evidently once had open arcaded sides, but these have been filled in with stonework, leaving the embedded pillars visible in niches. In the second porch stands an ornate font, its massive lid suspended from the ceiling. above which is the tower.
     Then you go up into the church under a large organ loft, which is approached by a winding wooden stair. The Skrabl organ was made by a firm in Slovenia, but the “shades” across the front of the pipes were elaborately carved out of lime wood by David West, of Mill Green, a wood-sculptor of almost miraculous skill. In two of them can be seen the painted faces, surrounded by seaweed-like hair, of a Green Man and a Green Woman, traditional figures of the English countryside.
     The interior ascends in three levels toward the eastern window. Yet the topmost level is below the ground outside: the church is dug into the slope.
     The church's auxiliary buildings covered a wider area. In 1833 the street was widened, and the diggers discovered part of a former kitchen of the vicarage. They found an oven with Dutch tiles, and two stone beads, which they painted and put on the beach “as a joke“.

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