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Kirk Hallam looks across to the church-crowned hill of Ilkeston. Its own little church has a low tower and walls 500 years old, its oldest relics being two fine fragments of Norman beakhead moulding, and the bowl of a Norman font. There are three old sedilia, and a piscina niche which is rare for having a tiny niche at each side.
In the church are memorials to the Newdigates who have had land here for many generations and had for their ancestor a Saxon chief. A brass tablet has a rhyming epitaph to old Patrick Rice, one of the queer fellows who pop up in our village histories. He wrote his epitaph two years before his death in 1766, and at the same time had his coffin made, keeping it behind his bed and using it regularly until his death as a home for his Sunday clothes.
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