Church of St Hubert

Church of St Hubert

Roman Catholic church built in 1865 to designs by E W Pugin and J Murray, in the Early English Gothic Revival style. The building is situated outside the small village of Dunsop Bridge in a rural location, set within a graveyard.

The church is constructed of local sandstone with green and grey slate roofs. Although oriented north-west to south-east, conventional liturgical orientations are used in the interior arrangement. The plan consists of an aisleless nave with a north-west porch and a sacristy to the south side. The apsidal sanctuary has lancet windows alternating with stepped buttresses and a semi-dome roof surmounted by an iron finial. The three-bay nave has buttresses to its east corners and is lit by triple lancets at the west end above a continuous sill band, with a single bellcote at the apex. The pitched roof is crowned with a large stone cross finial. A projecting sacristy to the south has a half-hipped roof with a buttressed south end and a plain window to either side. All windows throughout are lancets with plain hood moulds and projecting stone sills. There is a tall chamfered plinth to all elevations. The north-west porch is buttressed with a half-hipped roof and a full-height pointed-arched entrance with hood mould. The roofs are of alternating grey and green slate, though they have lost the original decorative ridge tiles. The presbytery and linking block attached to the sacristy are not included in the listing.

The interior of the apsidal east end is vaulted with marble-clad lower walls and slender marble engaged columns carrying the ribs of the apse. The sanctuary is richly decorated with painted and stencil decoration, including a depiction of the horse Kettledrum, upon whose Derby winnings the church is said to have been built. The sanctuary floor contains encaustic tiles with fleur de lys and other motifs. The original altar is retained, constructed with marble columns having floriated capitals and a polished granite frontal with a central panel of the Virgin Mary flanked by kneeling figures of St Hubert and a bishop. The walls to either side of the sanctuary are richly coloured and contain trefoil-headed recesses housing statues of the Virgin Mary and St Joseph. The east window by J B Capronnier of Brussels (1865) comprises three lancets depicting the Virgin and Child in the centre, St Anne to the left and St Veronica to the right. The nave has plastered and plainly painted walls with a boarded dado and retains its original benches with shaped and chamfered ends. It contains further stained glass windows and memorials to various members of the Towneley Family and others. The three-light west window, also by Capronnier, shows St Hubert and a stag in the central light, with Saints Peter and Paul to the left and right. A stone stoup adjacent to the west door is thought to be medieval in origin and was brought from a church at Burholme. A segmental-headed doorway leads to the full-height sacristy with original fittings, and a segmental-arched doorway provides access to the north-west porch. The arch-braced roof of the nave bears painted and stencilled decoration.

To the north-east of the church stands a stepped boundary wall of local sandstone with double-chamfered coping stones and original ornate railings with cross finials. A pedestrian entrance through the wall is marked by a timber hipped-roof lychgate. At either end of the wall, wider entrances are flanked by plain piers with gableted caps, with identical piers terminating each end of the wall. These structures contribute to the special interest of the principal building and are included in the listing.