Church Of St Leonard

The Church of St Leonard is an Anglican church dating from 1866 to 1869, designed by Angelo Waddington of Burnley. It was built in the Perpendicular style and constructed from hammer-dressed sandstone with ashlar dressings and steeply pitched slate roofs. The church has a cruciform plan, featuring a four-bay nave and a one-bay chancel, with aisles running along the nave and chancel, but not the transepts. There’s a single-story south porch, a north-east vestry, and a tall, stately, south-west tower.

The nave has a clerestory, while the chancel lacks one but features a parapet of pierced quatrefoils. Aisle and clerestory windows have chamfered reveals, hoodmoulds, two lights, and panel tracery, with varied designs. Cardinal-facing windows also possess panel tracery set in hollow-chamfered reveals under hoodmoulds. The chancel window has five lights, the south transept window has four lights above a doorway with a two-centre arch under a square hoodmould and decorated spandrels, the west end has four lights above three single lights, and the north transept has a rising arrangement of twelve lights. The south face of the tower includes a three-light window that was formerly a baptistery. Angle buttresses are present with several offsets.

The tower is divided into four stages with string courses that do not intersect the buttresses. The ringers' chamber has two lights on each face and sits above the main level. Above this are four clock faces set into square panels, with commemorative inscriptions and exhortatory texts within the spandrels. The belfry stage is slightly set back, flanked by panelled angle buttresses, with louvred openings consisting of two traceried lights separated by diagonally arranged buttresses. Battlements are articulated by four minor pinnacles and four corner turrets with spirelets.

The interior is built of sandstone ashlar with Perpendicular detailing. Nave arcades feature octagonal piers with moulded capitals. Arches to the transepts and chancel have engaged shafts with leaf corbels supporting the outer order of the arch. The roof is steeply pitched and hammer-beam construction, incorporating pierced spandrels carried on long wall shafts supported by angel corbels. An early 16th-century octagonal font, reputedly donated by John Paslew, the last Abbot of Whalley, is decorated with panels carved with emblems of the Passion, monograms IHS and M, and a shield bearing three mullets. A modern font cover complements the font’s design. Several memorial tablets are dedicated to the Starkie family of Huntroyde, who contributed generously to the church's construction. A particularly noteworthy tablet on the north wall of the chancel is a stele depicting a seated woman holding an urn and an angel pointing upwards; this was created by Francis Gibson to commemorate Le Gendre Starkie Esquire, who died in 1822. The church is an elegantly modelled building that dominates the local skyline.