Lancashire: Brief Historical and Descriptive NotesGrindon, Leo H. (Leo Hartley)
History
Lancashire: Brief Historical and Descriptive Notes
Grindon, Leo H. (Leo Hartley)
Lancashire (England) -- Description and travel
The second best of the old Lancashire ecclesiastical interiors belongs
to Sefton, near Liverpool, a building of the time of Henry VIII., upon
the site of a pre-Conquest church. The screen, which contains sixteen
stalls, presents a choice example of carved work. There is also a
fine carved-canopy over the pulpit, though time with the latter has
been pitiless. Striking architectural details are also plentiful with,
in addition, some remarkable monuments of Knights Templars with
triangular shields. Sefton church is further distinguished as one of
the few in Lancashire more than a hundred years old which possesses a
spire, the favourite style of tower in the bygones having been the
square, solid, and rather stunted--never in any degree comparable with
the gems found in Somerset, or with the circular towers that give so
much character to the churches of Norfolk and Suffolk. A very handsome
octangular tower exists at Hornby, on the banks of the Lune, built
about the middle of the sixteenth century. Winwick church, an ancient
and far-seen edifice near Warrington, supplies another example of a
spire; and at Ormskirk we have the odd conjunction of spire and square
tower side by side. Leland makes no mention of the circumstance--one
which could hardly have escaped his notice. The local tale which
proposes to explain it may be dismissed. The probability is that the
intention was to provide a place for the bells from Burscough Priory,
some of the monuments belonging to which were also removed hither when
the priory was dissolved.
Many remains show that in Lancashire, in the time of Henry VIII., the
spirit of church extension was again in full flow. Indications of it
occur at Warrington, Burnley, Colne, and St. Michael-le-Wyre, near
Garstang, also in the aisles of Middleton Church, and in the towers of
Rochdale, Haslingden, Padiham, and Warton, near Lancaster. Here,
however, we must pause; the history of the old Lancashire churches
treated in full would be a theme as broad and various as that of the
lives and writings of its men of letters. There is one, nevertheless,
which justly claims the special privilege of an added word, the very
interesting little edifice called Langho Chapel, four miles from
Blackburn, the materials of which it was built consisting of part of
the wreck of Whalley Abbey. Sculptured stones, with heraldic shields
and other devices, though much battered and disfigured, declare the
source from which they were derived; and in the heads of some of the
windows, which resemble the relics of others at the Abbey, are
fragments of coloured glass in all likelihood of similar origin. The
date of the building would seem to have been about 1557, though the
first mention of it does not occur until 1575. How curious and
suggestive are the reminders one meets with in our own country
(comparing the small with the great), of the quarrying of the
Coliseum by the masons of mediæval Rome!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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