Chilton Polden (literally ‘Children’s Town’), probably meaning belonging to the heirs (princes), is a village in the Sedgemoor district of Somerset 5 miles NE of Bridgwater and 8 miles W of Glastonbury. It is one of the string of satellites of the Abbey strung along the Polden Ridge (Lower Lias, of clay with some limestone) from Puriton to the NW on the Bristol Channel to the river Cary to the SE: fertile and easily worked land which still provides the raw material for agricultural prosperity. The Polden villages are typically less than a mile apart along what is today a minor road running almost parallel about half a mile N of the very busy trunk A39 road. To N and S are the low-lying moors across which there are even today very few routes: these must have been virtually under water in medieval times, especially in winter. The draining of the Somerset Levels was, of course, a project systematically and successfully pursued in the Middle Ages by their ecclesiastical and other owners. The modest church of today, hardly greater than a chapel, lies on the western side of a gentle valley in the western part of the village.
The church consists of a chancel with N organ chamber, nave with N aisle, N vestry, and S porch, and a bellcote over the W gable. Construction is of rubble with slate roofs. The building that preceded it on the same site was of 13thc origin and consisted on nave chancel and S porch only. The N transept was added in 1829, then in 1889 it was rebuilt and extended in 1889 to the designs of E. Henry Edwards of Bristol. The only Romanesque feature is a loose stone, formerly a holy water stoup.