All Saints' Church is all that remains of the medieval village of Kedleston, which was demolished in 1759 by Nathaniel Curzon to make way for the adjacent Kedleston Hall.
Curzon swept away the entire village and rerouted the public road so that Robert Adam could lay out the parkland around his new neoclassical showpiece.
The church is laid out on an unusually ambitious cruciform plan with a central tower over the crossing.The Norman South doorway has a round-headed arch decorated with a zigzag pattern.The memorial tomb to Mary, wife of Lord George Curzon, who died in 1906 at the age of 36. The chapel was added in 1908 and designed by G. F. Bodley. The tomb itself is a striking thing: a table tomb in white marble with effigies of Lord Curzon (the former Viceroy of India) and his wife, with two angels holding the crown of life leaning over them.
An interesting fact: Lord Curzon is depicted with one of his feet uncovered, meaning he was alive when he posed for the effigy.These gravestones are interesting as each has 2 different years of the year of death.
Before 1752, England used the Julian calendar and the legal year began on 25 March (Lady Day), not 1 January. So a death between 1 January and 24 March was ambiguous — under the old reckoning it fell in one year, under the new reckoning the next. Stonemasons and parish clerks often hedged by carving both years, e.g. "died 12 February 1745/6." After Britain adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, this practice faded out.
The fact that these gravestones are from before the transition period suggests that these are not the original gravestones and were added at a later date.