Church of St Bartholomew, Ruswarp

Church of St Bartholomew, Ruswarp

This Anglican church was designed by Charles Noel Armfield and built in 1869 in the Victorian Decorated style. It is constructed of coursed Grosmont sandstone blocks with ashlar dressings and has steeply pitched Welsh slate gabled roofs with terracotta ridge tiles and ashlar coped gables. The half-conical roof over the apse features contrasting bands and patterns of coloured slate.

The church has a five-bay nave with a two-bay chancel that finishes with an apsidal east end forming the sanctuary. The steeple is attached to the south side of the chancel and houses the vestry in its base. Extending west of the steeple is a two-bay side aisle forming the Lady Chapel, originally the children's aisle. The church is entered via a south porch that extends from the westernmost bay of the nave.

The church stands on rising ground and has a continuous chamfered plinth, with each bay set between buttresses and the corners having set-back buttresses. The windows are generally late 13th-century style plate tracery, mostly paired lancets with a foiled roundel above. The west window to the nave has geometric tracery incorporating four lancets topped by three multifoiled roundels.

The nave has five bays with a steeply pitched roof and coped gables topped with finials. The finial to the east is in the form of a wheel-headed cross, whilst that to the west is broken.

The south porch has an added external ramp and steps. It is gabled with flush side buttresses and has a lancet doorway closed by a pair of timber doors. A striated-edged roundel is set within the gable apex containing a skewed carved bust of St Bartholomew holding a scimitar. The west wall of the porch is blind, but the east wall has a pair of small lancets. Above the porch there is a single lancet to the nave.

The Lady Chapel or south side aisle has a mono-pitched slate roof with a plain coped verge. The west elevation has a small plate tracery window with two lancets and a trefoil roundel, and the south side has a pair of double lancet windows separated by buttresses. Above the chapel roof, the nave has a pair of quatrefoil windows.

Although the chancel with apse is slightly lower than the nave and has narrower bays, it is visually prominent because it extends over falling ground and is set on a tall plinth. The bays to the chancel and apse are separated by buttresses and are lit by plate tracery windows and octofoil roundels similar to those in the nave walls.

The tower takes the form of a five-stage steeple attached to the south side of the chancel and the east end of the south aisle. It has three angle-buttresses that extend up to the bell chamber and a stair turret with small slit windows and a narrow doorway that rises against the remaining north-east corner. The south side of the tower has an external stone stair with a cast-iron Gothic balustrade rising to a chamfered vestry door with a Caernarfon arch lintel. This vestry is lit by a pair of lancets in the east wall. The ringing room above the vestry is lit by single slits in the west and east elevations and a pair of slits to the south. The clock chamber above the ringing room has painted wrought-iron clock faces to the south and east elevations and a blocked oculus with a small window to the west. The bell chamber rises off a deep chamfered belfry stage above the clock chamber with paired louvred lancet openings to each side set within deep reveals. The chamber has a carved dentil string course at the springing level of the bell openings on three sides, with a foliate decorated band to the west and a moulded cornice above. The octagonal ashlar broach spire has two tiers of gabled lucarnes, a band of triangular openings, a weathercock, and large pyramidal pinnacles to the corners spirelets.

The church is entered via the south-west porch where internal double doors give access to a single-storey narthex inserted in 1990, which contains a parish room or Sunday school, cloakroom, toilet and kitchen within the two western bays of the nave. The narthex is separated by a panelled timber screen wall with a double half-glazed door leading into the nave. The narthex ceiling forms a floor to a west gallery which partially obscures the stained-glass west window depicting the twelve Apostles, produced by Mayer and Company of Munich.

The nave has a parquet floor with a central processional aisle flanked by heating grilles and a stone paved area in front of the chancel steps. The plastered walls are painted except for the exposed ashlar dressings, and it has a painted board wagon roof ceiling incorporating a row of pierced quatrefoils to either side of the ridge with two exposed and painted purlins to each side. The bases of six curved principal nave rafters are exposed and their ends rest on plain stone corbels. The easternmost pair of rafters are tight against the chancel arch. The nave's south wall has a two-bay arcade open to the Lady Chapel, formerly the children's aisle, which is carried on paired shafts with stiff-leaf capitals and a central column comprising a large central shaft with four secondary shafts.

The chancel arch is approached by three steps and consists of two simple orders. The inner is carried on wall shafts with carved capitals supported on carved corbels, and the outer is simply moulded with a hood mould on head corbels. It is flanked to its right by an oak cased organ by Chandos St George Dix.

The chancel has elaborately painted and patterned radiating roof timbers forming a ribbed vault over the chancel and the sanctuary, carried on stone wall shafts with carved floriated capitals springing from a moulded sill course with carved corbels. The ceiling panels are elaborately painted with angels, stars, planets, comets, a shaft of lightning, the sun, a crescent moon, round shields decorated with quatrefoils, and oval shields displaying the monograms IHS, the Greek abbreviation of Jesus, and INRI, the Latin initials for Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews. A memorial glass lantern with a foliate decorated cover hangs from chains suspended from the crown of the vaulted ceiling. The sanctuary is formed within the apsidal east end of the church and is delineated by a wrought-iron altar rail with a timber handrail, which is raised up on a step. The twelve memorial stained-glass panels of the chancel windows were installed in 1879 and depict events from the life of Jesus from birth to crucifixion, commemorating members of local families.

The Lady Chapel has a painted board ceiling like that of the nave, which is carried on an arched ashlar masonry rib. A stained-glass window in the west wall of the Lady Chapel commemorates the golden jubilee of Queen Victoria. A deeply recessed Caernarfon arch doorway in the opposite wall leads into the vestry beneath the steeple.

The font is sited in the nave next to the central column of the arcade to the Lady Chapel and is an elaborately carved octagonal font raised on a stone podium with a brass plaque that reads: THIS FONT AND ACCOMPANYING BRASS EWER BEARING MONOGRAM (initials TWB) WERE GIVEN TO THIS CHURCH IN THE YEARS OF OUR LORD 1869 & 1876 BY THOMAS WILLIAM AND JANE BELCHER OF MAYFIELD IN THIS PARISH. The font is formed of a pillar supported by four secondary pink marble shafts that rise from the podium and support the bowl of the font. The font's sides have carved panels depicting the presentation of the baby Jesus, Christ baptised by John the Baptist, Christ the protector of children, and five floral motifs. The panels are set between eight pink marble shafts with floriated capitals, a cornice, and a carved frieze that reads: GOD THE FATHER ONE FAITH ONE LORD ONE BAPTISM ONE SPIRT ONE BODY ONE HOPE.

War memorials, which were planned for removal in 2022 for eventual public display elsewhere, include an oak rood beam war memorial by Robert "Mouseman" Thompson of Kilburn, installed in the chancel arch in 1920. It has a pierced gallery and is surmounted by a carving of Christ crucified. The rood beam cuts across the chancel arch and has gilded lettering that reads: SO GOD LOVED THE WORLD THAT HE GAVE HIS ONLY BEGOTTEN SON. There is an associated white marble dedication tablet set within an alabaster frame decorated with roses, attached to the right-hand side of the chancel arch, which reads: TO THE GLORY OF GOD AND IN SACRED MEMORY OF THOSE WHO FROM THIS PARISH GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE GREAT WAR 1914-19 THIS ROOD IS DEDICATED, followed by a list of fourteen names. An iron crucifix from Ypres that was pierced by a bullet is attached to the wall above the dedication plaque with a brass tablet that reads: THE BULLET PIERCED CRUCIFIX ABOVE THE TABLET WAS PICKED UP BY A BRITISH SOLDIER ON THE BATTLEFIELDS OF YPRES, AND WAS PRESENTED TO THIS CHURCH WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE BURGOMASTER OF THAT CITY.