Roman Catholic Church of St Anne

Roman Catholic Church of St Anne

This is a Roman Catholic church built in 1855 to designs by George Goldie. The stained glass in the main windows was created by John Hardman Powell.

The church is constructed from local sandstone ashlar with Welsh slate roofs. It follows a conventional Gothic plan with an aisled nave and an unaisled sanctuary at the east end. A tower rises above the entrance porch at the west end of the south aisle, and a sacristy extends northward from the east end of the north aisle.

The exterior is designed in the first-pointed Gothic or Early English style, employing both plate and geometric tracery windows. The building has a simple tall plinth, angle buttresses, and minimal external ornament. The gables are coped and topped with stone Celtic crosses.

The chancel comprises two bays with geometric tracery windows. The side windows contain a quatrefoil with two trefoil-headed lights below, while the east window has three lights with a trefoil to the head and a simple hood mould. The nave extends over four bays with a low clerestory of plate tracery trefoils. The side aisle windows feature plate tracery with paired lancets headed by either a quatrefoil or a plain roundel. The west nave window has a simple chamfered surround and geometric tracery consisting of four lancets headed by roundels.

The tower is square and squat, divided into two stages by a string course and topped with a plain parapet that largely conceals the pyramidal roof. The upper stage has paired, trefoil-headed openings to three sides of the bell chamber, closed with timber louvers. At the tower base, a two-centred arched doorway leads to the enclosed porch. Above this sits a trefoil-headed and canopied niche containing a statue of St Anne with her child, the Virgin Mary. The Calvary to the left of the tower forms part of a later link building connecting the church to the presbytery.

Inside, the walls are plastered and painted, with only the nave columns and window tracery left as exposed stonework. The nave arcades have cylindrical columns with simple capitals supporting plain-chamfered, pointed but nearly round arches. The sanctuary arch is treated similarly. The roof structure is exposed, featuring braced collars and short hammer-beams; the sanctuary roof is embellished with stencilling. The floor is mainly tiled in black and red throughout the main body of the church, with enriched geometric patterning in black, red, white and buff tiles in the sanctuary.

The high altar is stone with painted decoration, set forward of a stone reredos which is also painted. This is flanked by stone pedestals supporting statues of the Sacred Heart on the left and the Virgin Mary on the right. A timber altar rail, positioned beneath the sanctuary arch and possibly predating the church, differs in style from the pine pews, which are thought to date to the 1850s. A rectangular stone pulpit with painted decoration and supported by two short columns stands on the north side of the sanctuary arch. A stone font sits on the south side. At the east end of the south aisle is a further stone altar serving the Lady Chapel, with a large niche containing a statue of Mother and Child in place of an east window. The north aisle contains a 19th-century pine-panelled confessional.

The main east and west windows are thought to have been installed when the church opened and are believed to have been designed by Powell. Two further windows in the north aisle may also be by him, being similar in style and using comparable colour intensity and palette. The remaining seven stained glass windows are later memorial windows, probably by other designers. The rest of the windows, including all those in the clerestory, are plain glazed.