Church Of St Mark

Church of St Mark, Longwood

A parish church built between 1877 and 1882 by W. Cocking of the firm J.W. Cocking & Sons, architects of Huddersfield, at a cost of over £4280. A tower was added in 1914. The building is constructed of coursed squared sandstone with Westmorland graded-slate roofs and ridge tiles.

The church follows an asymmetrical plan with an aisled nave, south-west tower, north-west porch, lower chancel, north organ chamber, and south vestry. The exterior is designed in Decorated Gothic style with steep roofs on corbel tables and coped gables. The nave and buttressed aisles are five bays long, featuring a clerestorey and aisle windows with alternate Y-tracery and geometrical tracery. The south aisle wall carries a sundial with gnomon, made by Joseph Miller in 1749, which was brought from another site and restored in 1829, 1921 and 1993. The porch has a moulded entrance arch with a single order of shafts and leaf capitals. The west front displays a four-light window. The south-west tower is a thin Perpendicular structure of three stages with diagonal buttresses with gabled offsets and an embattled parapet with corner pinnacles on a deep corbel table. The lower stage contains an east doorway with moulded surround, the middle stage has small square-headed windows, and the bell stage features tall three-light openings with louvres and panelling above an impost band. The chancel has a four-light east window under a circle with blind trefoil, and single-light north and south windows. Both the organ chamber and vestry have lean-to roofs; the vestry contains two trefoil-headed south windows with hood moulds and head stops, and a blocked east window, whilst the organ chamber has a moulded doorway.

Internally, the nave arcades feature octagonal piers and double-chamfered arches. The nave roof is constructed with two tiers of arched braces above and below collar beams, with simpler subsidiary collar-beam trusses. The chancel has an arched-brace roof on stiff-leaf corbels. The chancel arch is finely moulded, as are the arches leading to the organ chamber and vestry. Walls are plastered except for exposed stonework on the east wall of the nave. The nave floor is wood-block.

The furnishings date mainly from the early twentieth century and maintain consistent quality throughout. The font has a circular painted bowl on a round stem with a tall Gothic wooden canopy; Gothic panelling stands behind it against the west nave wall. Benches have square ends with blind tracery. The polygonal pulpit, dated 1922, has open Gothic tracery on a freestone pedestal. The chancel screen, dated 1926, is in late-medieval style with open tracery lights, cornice, brattishing, and a large cross surmounting it. Choir stalls feature ends with poppy heads and blind tracery, with open tracery to the frontals. The reredos, dated 1919, displays a vine trail cornice and brattishing. Several windows contain stained glass: the east window by Curtis, Ward & Hughes dates to 1899; two windows in the north aisle are by Jones & Willis; a window by A.J. Moore showing Christ as the Light of the World dates to 1918; and a 1914-18 war-memorial window occupies the west.

A drawing of a tower by J.W. Cocking and Frank Abbey is dated 1913, though the tower as built differs from this design and may have been executed by the same architects. The Hirst family, owners of a local textile mill, funded some of the early twentieth-century fittings.