St Oswald's Church, Ashbourne
St Oswald’s rises over Ashbourne with a spire of 212 feet, one of the tallest on any English parish church. George Eliot, who had family in the district, called it the finest mere parish church in England. The cruciform building is largely 13th-century, and its best-known monument is Thomas Banks’s marble of Penelope Boothby, carved in 1793 as a child asleep — a work that reportedly moved Queen Charlotte to tears at the Royal Academy. Open to visitors.
