Church Of St Michael

The Church of St Michael is a parish church, dating to a 1770 rebuilding on a medieval site. It was extensively altered in 1850, with a south porch added in 1884. The church is constructed of coursed squared sandstone rubble, thinly rendered in places, with an ashlar plinth and dressings. It has a roof of graduated Lakeland slates, and the porch roof is stone-flagged with stone gable copings. The building consists of a nave with a south porch and transept, and a chancel with a north porch.

The gabled porch has a chamfered, cusped two-centred-arched surround to a boarded door with ornamental hinges, within a shafted, roll-moulded arch with a leaf-stopped dripmould, side buttresses, and a stone cross finial. The nave has a Perpendicular style three-light north window, two cusped south windows, and a two-light west window with bar tracery. A blocked spherical-triangular window sits above the west window, beneath a gabled bellcote with a fleur-de-lys finial. The transept has a two-light Decorated-style window under a gabled roof with side buttresses, and paired lancets in the east wall, with an external chimney-stack at the south-east. The chancel has a four-light Perpendicular-style south window, and a three-light Decorated-style east window. The north porch has paired cusped ogee lights, and the north front features a shouldered arch and lights; an external chimney stack is also present. Stone cross finials and medieval-style chimneys are visible.

The inner porch contains trailing iron foliage decoration. The interior has painted plaster with ashlar dressings, a boarded dado beside the pews and a boarded, panelled roof on a cornice, with Tudor-flower bosses on the chancel panels. A chamfered transept arch is accompanied by a similar inner arch on corbelled round shafts. A low, square-headed piscina, slightly-chamfered, is set into the south chancel wall. Features include hollow-chamfered rerearches and a two-centred-arched vestry door. An organ is located in the transept. Stained glass in the south nave window is by G.J. Baguley, and the north nave war memorial is by Atkinson Bros., both of Newcastle upon Tyne. A Lee memorial in the transept is by H.M. Barnet of the same town. A plaque in the nave, signed Walker and Emley, is dated 1884 and commemorates the gift of the porch and transept window in memory of a former vicar. An Early 14th-century effigy, against the south wall of the transept, has slightly-eroded costume detail; a headless effigy of a child wrapped in a christening cloth rests on the south window-sill of the transept.