St. Helen's has a timber-framed tower, much like that at Drayton St Leonard where there is a "low tower with a pyramid roof and entirely timber-framed, unusual in Oxfordshire." Waterperry also has a timber-framed tower while Lyford parish church has a wooden bell turret. "A photograph [of St Helen's taken just before the restoration in 1890 shows it had then merely been faced with simple weather-boarding carried nearly to the top, where, as now, horizontal apertures were contrived to release the sound of the bells."