Stanton by Dale is a village about three miles S of Ilkeston. The church lies to the N of the village and consists of a coursed squared gritstone building comprising a chancel, a nave with a N aisle and a S porch, a N vestry and a W tower. The building was extensively restored in 1872, when the chancel and the N aisle were extended and several Romanesque pieces of the original church were re-employed in the altered structure. The surviving Romanesque elements consist of three fragments of three 12thc incised sepulchral crosses, which are reset into the exterior N wall of the N aisle and into the churchyard wall, and the tympanum of the S doorway.

The Domesday Survey records that in 1066 'Stantone' was held by Ulf Fenman; in 1086 its lordship passed to Mauger of Ilkeston, being Gilbert of Ghent its tenant-in-chief. The manor valued £5. The church was granted at an early date to the neighbouring Dale Abbey, which also acquired most of the land in the parish. The church was considered to be within the peculiar jurisdiction of the abbot until the Dissolution.

The tympanum could be dated to the late 11thc, whilst the cross fragments reset in the N aisle were possibly carved during the second half of the 12thc. These fragments were located in the outer N wall of the chancel when John Charles Cox noted them in 1879, and were probably moved during the construction of the vestry. Cox (1879), 418, mentions "a four-circled cross", which probably corresponds with the piece now too weathered to describe, which is located in the churchyard wall; it can be dated to c.1200 or early 13thc.