Church of St Michael is a Grade II listed building in the County Durham local planning authority area, England. First listed on 17 January 1967. Church.
Church of St Michael
- WRENN ID
- steep-stone-storm
- Grade
- II
- Local Planning Authority
- County Durham
- Constituency
- City of Durham MP: Mary Kelly Foy (Lab)
- Country
- England
- Date first listed
- 17 January 1967
- Type
- Church
- Address
- Church of St Michael, Front Street, Esh
- OS grid reference
- NZ 196 440
- Coordinates
- 54.79077, -1.69544
- Source
- Historic England listing
Description
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.
Local climate
Church of St Michael receives an average of 830 mm of rain a year. This makes it wetter than 53% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is lower than that of 99% of listed buildings.
It experiences an average of 46 freeze-thaw cycles a year, more than 87% of listed buildings. Of these, 28 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.
Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.
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