Brookland comes from the Old English ‘brōc’ meaning a ‘brook, stream’ with ‘land’
as ‘land, an estate’; therefore, ‘cultivated land at a brook’.
Brookland parish church is a Grade: I listed building, dedicated to Saint Augustine.
The Normans built it in the mid-13th century, with extensions in the following 200
years. William Chamberlain cast and hung a bell in 1440. John Hodson cast four additional
bells in 1685. In 1799, Edward Hasted described the Brookland church as a ‘very large
handsome building, consisting of three isles and three chancels. The steeple stands
on the north side, and at some small distance from it, in which are five bells. The
church is kept exceedingly neat and clean. It is cieled throughout, and handsomely
pewed. In the high chancel there is a confessionary, and a nich for holy water within
the altar-rails… The steeple is framed of remarkable large timber. It is built entirely
of wood, of an octagon form, perpendicular about five feet from the bottom, and from
thence leffening to a spire at top, in which it has three different copartments or
stories, the two uppermost larger at the bottom, and projecting over those underneath
them. Although there are but five bells in it, yet it has frames for several more.
The whole is much out of the perpendicular leaning towards the church’. The architect
Thomas White restored the church in 1790, with further restorations the 1950’s and
60’s. In 1973, Whitechapel reformulated the bells, and added two trebles to complete
a ring of six.
