Church Of St Patrick

The Church of St. Patrick is a Roman Catholic parish church built between 1893 and 1895 by C. Walker of Newcastle. It is constructed from rock-faced sandstone with ashlar dressings and features a Welsh slate roof with high cavetto-moulded stone gable coping on roll-moulded, gabled footstones. The church is oriented north-south and includes a nave with ritual north and south aisles, north and south transepts, and a chancel with north and south side chapels. The undercroft of the nave is built into a hill.

Designed in an early 14th-century style, the church is richly ornamented. The five-bay nave has flat-headed three-light windows that are stone-mullioned with alternate-block jambs. The aisles feature three-light Decorated windows beneath dripmoulds. The transepts contain two pairs of cusped lancets above two pairs of Tudor-arched windows, with a slit window in the gable peak and sill and lintel bands. The arcaded five-sided apse has lancet windows under hoodmoulds with block stops, and the three-sided side chapels have similar windows. The roof is hipped over the chancel and chapels, adorned with red ridge tiles and a lead octagonal fleche at the crossing, topped with cross finials.

On the west front, there is a perron stair leading to a segment-headed entrance to the undercroft. The double boarded church door is set in a pointed-arched opening beneath a dripmould with an ogee finial, flanked by crocketed niches, with a wheel window above. A five-sided corner staircase is located to the left, and flying buttresses are present at the west end over the undercroft access.

Inside, the church features a flower-stopped hoodmould over the nave arcade, a sill string, and hoodmoulds to the clerestory windows, as well as rear arches to the aisle windows. The interior has a barrel roof supported on shafted brackets with struts and tall, paired transept arches. The altar is ornate, set within an arcaded sanctuary that includes niches, and the pulpit is made of alabaster on a Frosterley marble base by Emley of Newcastle, complemented by a stone and marble communion rail.