The only part that has been modernised is the chancel. It was rebuilt thirty years ago, and in it you may see many sepulchral memorials of the Stanleys and other local notabilities. On the south side is the monumental effigy of John Thomas, the first Lord Stanley, who died in 1850, and on the opposite side, on an altar-tomb, richly inlaid with mosaic work, is the sculptured form of the last lord, who died in 1869; it is an exquisite work of art, and as you gaze upon the chiselled features you are struck with the remarkable resemblance they bear to the late Dean of Westminster. Against the wall on the same side of the chancel is a tablet of white marble in memory of Edward Stanley--the Bishop of Norwich--and his wife and their two sons, Charles Edward and Owen Stanley, and their daughter Mary. From these marble memorials of the dead you turn to the galleried pew where, in life, those they commemorate were wont to worship. The front of that little enclosure is resplendent with heraldic blazonries, and tells, in the language of the "noble science," the story of the marriages of the lords of Alderley for a couple of centuries or more. The Stanleys are evidently proud of their armorial ensigns, for they are displayed on every hand, and as you gaze upon the oft-repeated shields the memory wanders back along the dim avenues of the past to the time when, ages ago, a Sir William Stanley, by his marriage with the heiress of Bamville, obtained the forest of Wyrral, and with it the right to bear, as his device, the three bucks' heads upon a cross-belt of cerulean hue; and to the time, too, when that Sir William's great-grandson married the heiress of the house of Lathom, and thereafter assumed as his crest the eagle and child--the "brid and babby," as Lancashire people prefer to call it--which tradition commemorates the circumstance of an infant being found in an eagle's nest by a Lathom, who adopted it, and, being childless, made it heir of all his lands. The church is not a large building, but it is exceedingly picturesque, and its interest is nothing lessened by the consciousness that within its walls the voice of praise and thanksgiving has been heard for five hundred years and more. Everything about it is decent and comely, as befits the house of God, and if a stranger should happen to be there on a Sunday he will find the services creditably sung by a choir of boys, and the prayers devoutly read by a clergyman who is a sound Churchman, and a worthy successor of good old Edward Stanley.