Parish Church

The parish church at Boraston dates to the 13th century and was extensively renewed and enlarged between 1884 and 1887 by Henry Curzon. It is constructed primarily of stone rubble with ashlar dressings, with the upper stage of the tower weatherboarded. The roofs are tiled, with a shingled, broach spire.

The plan comprises a chancel with a north vestry, a nave, a tower with a south porch. The chancel features a late 19th-century, hipped, apsidal east end with a projecting gable and an east window of twin lancets surmounted by a vesica. Lancets are in the Early English style. The vestry has a hipped tiled roof, a door, and a three-light mullion window, all with plain, chamfered jambs and rounded tops. An ashlar ridge chimney has an octagonal shaft. The nave’s north wall has three restored cusped lancets and a blocked Norman doorway. The south wall features a restored cusped lancet and two 19th-century flat-headed windows with cusped ogee tracery, with vestiges of a blocked Norman doorway.

The tower’s lower stage has a pointed arched south doorway with a hoodmould. It has a cinquefoil window to the west and a lancet to the north, all in the Early English style. The upper stage is a weatherboarded timber frame, jettied off ashlar corbels. Timber bell-openings are present on each face with ogee lintels and louvres on cusped projecting mullions. The spire is shingled with sprocket eaves. A south porch is set into the angle of the tower and nave, featuring a steep tiled gabled roof with bargeboards and a shingled apex to the truss. The truss has a carved tie beam with a projected cross on a bracket, a cusped ogee arch under the tie, and oak timber-framed side walls on a high ashlar plinth.

Inside, the two-bay chancel consists of a single bay and an apsidal bay. Features include a pulpit, chancel screen, and lectern from around 1884. The four-bay nave roof has four trusses of twin swept raking struts and one vertical strut below the collar; the chamfered tie beam has plain stepped chamfer stops. The roof is a restored single-purlin design with scissor-trussed rafters. A font from around 1700 has a bowl with raised spirals, displaying vestiges of earlier eroded carving.