Brockley is a village on the N side of the A370 Bristol to Weston-super-Mare road, some 8 mls SW of Bristol. Brockley (‘wood or clearing by the brook’) church is an estate church. The adjacent manor house is now a home for adults with learning difficulties. The church is very difficult to appreciate externally because of surrounding walls and trees. It lies a short distance from the foot of the NW-facing scarp of the limestone ridge (a Mendip outlier) which runs from just W of Dundry Hill to the E as far as just N of Congresbury to the W. This would have been a very peaceful part of the Kenn valley before the GWR built its Bristol-Exeter main line 1.3km NW of the church; it still is quite sequestered, since the lane leading to Brockley Court from the main road leads nowhere else. That main A370 links Bristol with the M5 and Weston-super-Mare; less than 400m south of the church, it runs extremely busily along the foot of the aforementioned scarp. The church lies at an altitude of about 25m above OD on a rise of Mercia Mudstone (Keuper Marl) above the surrounding Head.

The church consists of a nave with S porch, N and S chapels, chancel with vestry and a W tower. It is essentially 12thc, altered 13thc to 15thc, and again altered c.1820-30 for the Smyth-Pigott family. Construction is of coursed rubble with freestone dressings. 12thc features recorded here are the S nave doorway, corbels reset inside the porch, and the font.

The unusual appearance of the doorway might be due to 19thc alterations, but there is no doubt that the carved features are original 12thc work. For Pevsner: ‘The S doorway . . . is Norman, but these extremely attenuated shafts and this thin roll-moulding with applied zigzag decoration in the arch make one suspicious.' For NMR, the ‘South doorway is early — mid 12thc but probably re-cut: thin columns with square scalloped capitals and zigzag moulded arch.’

The reset corbels are mentioned neither in Pevsner nor NMR. Pevsner and NMR both describe the font as 12thc, but have little further to offer.