The churchyard contains the base and shaft of a 15th-century cross, another of those many crosses we have found all over the Cotswolds which mark a stopping point during the pilgrimages in medieval times. It also contains a number of 18th-century carved chest-tombs and headstones, and plainer tombs of the 18th and 19th centuries with copper inscription plates, including some signed by Cook of Stroud, Ursell of Cirencester, Iles of Minchinhampton, and Freebury of Stroud. The churchyard was closed for burials in the 1940s.
St Kenelrn, to whom this church is dedicated and who has seven other churches in England bearing his name ,was the boy-king of Mercia,. In 819 when he was but seven years old, and succeeded to the throne, his older sister Quendryra, supposedly wanting the throne for herself, is said to have persuaded Kenelm’s guardian, Askobert – with hints that he might share the throne with her – to take the boy into the forest, murder him and bury him in an unmarked grave…

This Askobert supposedly did, enabling Quendryra to observe, brightly, that her little brother seemed to have disappeared. The plotters, however, were soon undone. Miraculously, a dove flew to Rome bearing a scroll telling the Pope where Kenelm ‘s body could be found. After a long delay whilst a translator was found to decipher the scroll, (there weren’t many English speakers in Rome in those days) the Pope apparently responded and Kenelm’s faithful subjects recovered the body and bore it home to Winchcombe Abbey. On the journey, wherever the body was set down, a clear spring of healing water materialised, a prelude to many other miracles. As for Quendryra, her eyes fell out onto her Psalter while she was reciting a curse against her little brother as he was carried through the streets of Winchcombe and she died soon afterwards.