The Church is dedicated to the Most Holy Saviour and claims to contain fragments of the Rock of Calvary and of the Holy Sepulchre.
A former Anglican clergyman, a Mgr H.V. Lean, wanted to establish a convent and church in his birthplace of Lynton. Fortunately Bishop Charles Graham had already given permission for an exiled group of Poor Clares to make a foundation in the Diocese. In 1904 Mgr. Lean was put in touch with a group of Poor Clare nuns, from Rennes (France), who were staying with the Franciscan Sisters in Woodchester, Gloucestershire. Mgr. Lean settled the nuns in a house in Lynmouth while he built a convent and chapel for them in Lynton. Construction work was completed and the buildings dedicated in 1910. The Church was later extended and consecrated as a Parish Church on 8th September 1931.
The building was designed by the architect Leonard Stokes and the style is "free" or "Italian" Byzantine. There is an eighteenth century marble altar from the disused Church of SS. Simon & Jude in Rome, also an Italian statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary which dates from the eighteenth or even possibly seventeenth century. Above the statue is the inscription: "Nihil ergo nunc damnationis est eis qui sunt Christo Jesu qui non secundem carnem am bul an Deus erat in Christo mundum reconcilians sii quem cum non videritis diligitis in quem quoqz non videntes creditis."
Beneath the High Altar there is an urn containing the remains of four martyrs. At the consecration ceremony Bishop Barrett inserted in the sepulchre, in the mensa, the relics of SS. Vicentius and Felicitas, and the decorpore relics of the Martyr Blessed John Southworth.
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