Crosby-based photographer and author Matthew Byrne’s latest book highlights some of the treasures in our churches. Here he selects some of the most memorable in Lancashire.
There are many factors that contribute to the lasting memory a visitor caries away from a church.
First, there’s great architecture on a grand scale - externally and internally. Second is the historic and artistic quality of the furnishings: the stained glass, woodwork, sculpture and tapestries. The third factor is a church’s setting – no other buildings in England are to be found in more widely diverse locations and geography. To explore English churches is to explore England.
There are many memorable churches across Lancashire and the Lake District, this is a personal selection which vary in age from the 11th century to the late 20th.
St Mary’s, Leyland
This is pioneering modern architecture on the early 1960s in a Roman Catholic parish staffed by Benedictine monks. Outside there is a detached lightweight open-framed belfry tower and a canopied entrance leads which leads to an ambulatory encircling the entire building.
One striking feature of the interior is the circle of windows in the outer wall of the ambulatory. These are arranged in separate ground-to-ceiling bays framed in concrete and filled with glass by the distinguished designer Patrick Reyntiens. The abstract work is made of irregularly-shaped pieces in various shades of blue, with occasional bright reds.
All Hallows, Great Mitton
This church, with a 13th century nave and a 15th century sandstone tower, has a late medieval rood screen, an Elizabethan font and an early Georgian pulpit. The historic showpiece is the north chapel which is filled with monuments to the Shireburne family who lived at Stonyhurst Hall until they sold it to Jesuit priests for use as a school.
The monuments include a moving 18th century monument to Richard Shirburne who died aged nine. In the churchyard there is a tall 14th century cross which, unusually, retains the figures at its head.
READ MORE: Lancashire walk - Mitton
The Priory Church of St Mary, Lancaster
This church occupies a spectacular hill-top site in the city centre with distant views across the Morecambe Bay to the southern Lakeland hills. Here, the Normans established a castle and a Benedictine priory. The domestic buildings of the priory did not survive the Dissolution in the 1530s but the stately priory church escaped as a parish church.
The 14th century canopied monks’ choir stalls are the most luxurious in England and among the monuments is one to the dying Sybil Wilson aged seven, with her parents at her bedside in 1773.
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St Agnes, Sefton Park, Liverpool
The city has some of the most spectacular Victorian churches in England. St Agnes was financed by a wealthy stockbroker who commissioned John Loughborough Pearson, one of the greatest architects of the time, to build it in the early 1880s. It is a strikingly tall but compact building with two sets of transepts, a blaze of red in hard glazed brick.
Inside all is in buff-coloured limestone, including the rib-vaulted stone roof, an expensive rarity in parish churches. Pearson’s speciality was the use of multiple arcades which intercept each other, creating intriguing vistas. There is much opulence and even the large organ is mounted on top of an arcaded octagon.
St Anthony’s, Cartmel Fell
To find this church needs knowledge and perseverance among a confusing maze of wooded lanes where there is no village – just scattered cottages and farmhouses. The church was built in 1505 as a chapel-of-ease for Cartmel, a low ground-hugging building with a squat west tower. From the churchyard, the views over the fells stretch for miles and inside there are medieval screens, family pews and a contemporary chancel window.
Matthew Byrne’s book The Treasures of English Churches, published by Shire, is out now, priced £20.
