Church Heritage Record 624376

Broad 5-bay nave, west tower with stair block to gallery and small spire, 3-bay chancel with large 2-bay south transept, north organ chamber/vestry.

Nave c 20m (70 ft) x 13m (45ft)

Built 1840-41, with chancel and transept added c 1873. There seems to be no record of the architects involved. The furnishings and fittings appear to mostly date to a refurbishment in 1878-87, and the main patrons were the Munn family of Heath Hill (they built Stacksteads Mill in 1833). Some work was done in the chancel in 1929.  In recent years the south transept and the narthex under the west gallery have been converted to provide modern facilities. A toilet block has been added to the vestry on the north side.

The church is designed in a neo-Norman style, except the 1873 chancel and transept which are in the Decorated Gothic style. The two parts of the building are not completely incompatible, although the massing and silhouette is a little jerky, the south transept perhaps unduly prominent and its corner pinnacles challenging the small west spire for attention.

The west tower is slender, of three stages with pilasters and gablets to the second stage, which carries an octagonal belfry finished with a small spire with lucarnes and cross finial. It has a moulded recessed round-headed west doorway of several orders with a blind arcade of arches above, and a round-headed west window containing 2 round-headed lights, with single blocked lancets to the other faces. There are clock faces in the west and south gablets, and tall round-headed louvred openings in the cardinal sides of the belfry.

The matching nave is very plain and modest, with pilaster strips and tall chamfered round-headed lancets to each bay and one in the walls each side of the tower, that on the north side within a block containing the gallery stairs. There is a blocked round-headed doorway under the window on the south side. The roof is very shallowly pitched.

By contrast, the south transept off the chancel attracts the eye, being perhaps the dominant feature of the building. It has a steep roof and angle buttresses finished as large pinnacles, there is also a cross finial and small lead fleche with domed cap in the middle. The south face is pierced by two 3-light 2-centred arched windows with Decorated tracery and hoodmoulds, round foiled window above in the gable. Tall pointed 2-lights to the east wall, another in the south bay of the west wall which bites into the cat-slide roof; this continues over a small porch with pointed doorway under a hoodmould in the north bay. 

The chancel is the same height as the nave, and higher than the transept, its roof just visible over the latter. It has a large 5-light traceried east window with a transom.  A moulded stone chimney stack rises from the vestry. The north side is blind to the organ chamber bay and then there is a small toilet block under a lean-to roof. This side of the church is hard up against a sloping cobbled path heading east up the hill.

The walls are whitewashed, with a yellow panelled ceiling to the broad, simple vessel of a nave. Looking first west, there is a west gallery with interlaced arcade front panelling. The gallery above and nave are fully pewed with dark-stained benches with moulded ends. Red carpet down the aisle, encaustic tiles exposed at the east end.

Looking east, the large rounded chancel arch with shafts and hoodmould suggests that there was an earlier chancel. There are round-headed arches flanking this, that to the north displaying the organ pipes, to the south giving access to the south transept, now with a glazed screen with door.  The late Victorian chancel is open to these through 2-bay arcades with columns and semi-octagonal responds, which have foliated capitals and shaft-rings. The chancel roof has arch-braced hammerbeam trusses. Within the south transept is a converted parish room with kitchen and toilets, the ceilings and walls of which cut across some of the stained glass windows.

Three steps to the chancel, which has High Victorian furnishings and fittings, with a stone pulpit and huge coved organ case on the north side, high-backed choir stalls with open tracery fronts, a plaster reredos, traceried oak altar and communion rails and encaustic tiled floors, the latter rather spoiled, again, by the ubiquitious red carpet, though the sanctuary is free of this. Lozenge in the tiles in sanctuary floor in memory of Robert Munn JP of Heath Hill, died 1879. The vestry is contained by an open tracery dark-stained screen and curtains in the north-east corner.