Church Of The Holy Trinity

Church of the Holy Trinity, Chapel Stile, Langdale

Parish church of 1857 designed by John A. Cory, an architect based in Carlisle and Durham who built several churches across northern England from the 1840s onwards. Cory was County Surveyor of Cumberland from 1862 to 1868 before entering partnership with C.J. Ferguson. He lived from 1819 to 1887.

The church is constructed of snecked local slate-stone rubble with light-brown freestone dressings, a roughcast west front, and a graded-slate roof. Its plan comprises a nave with a long north aisle that incorporates a vestry, a south tower and porch, and a lower chancel.

The exterior displays Decorated-style architecture with asymmetrical character provided by a stout three-stage south tower, which incorporates the porch at its lower stage. The tower is unbuttressed with upper stages that progressively narrow beneath an embattled crown. The porch features a south doorway with continuous double chamfer and a cusped west window. The second stage contains small narrow windows, while the upper stage has two-light shoulder-headed openings with louvres.

The nave west front has two two-light windows and deep angle buttresses. South-facing windows are square-headed with ogee-headed lights, comprising one two-light window to the left of the tower and two three-light windows to its right. The chancel south wall has a simpler two-light window with cusped lights and no tracery, while the east window is three-light Decorated. The north aisle, which is shorter than the nave and chancel and faces a steep bank, has windows similar to the chancel south window. It includes a two-light west window, a one-light vestry window on the north side, and in the east wall a three-light vestry window and doorway in a freestone surround.

The interior features four-bay arcades with octagonal piers and double-chamfered arches. The nave has a five-bay arched-brace roof on corbels, and the chancel has a similar but keeled three-bay roof. The chancel arch is double chamfered with the inner order on corbels. Walls are plastered and there are raised floorboards below pews.

Mid and late nineteenth-century furnishings include a plain octagonal font, benches and choir stalls with shaped ends, and an octagonal pulpit with Gothic panelling. The communion rail has a quatrefoil frieze and the reredos features Gothic panelling. Several late nineteenth and early twentieth-century windows are present, including an Ascension window in the nave signed by A.L. Moore and dated 1910. A Boer War memorial brass plaque is also housed within the church.