St Mary's Church

St Mary's Church

This is a substantial late medieval parish church with a nave and chancel without external distinction, a west bellcote, a south porch, a short north transept serving as a stairs annexe with the chimney of a 19th-century heating apparatus incorporated into it, and a massive crude buttress at the west.

The walls are generally built in local gritstone, with larger blocks at the base and a slight outward slope at low level to the east, north and south sides. The west buttress has several offsets. Stonework higher in the walls, probably from the 19th-century restoration, is more regularly coursed. The buttresses themselves date from the 19th century but are built on earlier foundations. The south porch is an addition in slatey shale stonework that is not properly bonded to the nave and shows signs of settlement.

The roof is of slate with a tile ridge and has coped gables to east, west and north with stone crosses as finials to the east and north. The bellcote has two apertures with flattened trefoiled heads and carries a small metal weathervane.

The most notable external feature is a fine Perpendicular east window of five wide lights with the transom set a little above the springing line of the arch. It has two tracery sub-arches and grotesque faces, probably from an earlier church, used as label terminal heads. The chancel north-east window is small with two lights, and the south-east window has three lights with simple intersecting arch tracery. The other windows are 19th-century work. The south doorway has a narrow pointed arch with a single chamfer. The door is of oak, boarded and counterboarded with clenched nails all over, and has hinges with fleur de lys terminations. A stoup stands to the right.

The interior is a broad aisleless space with a single roof covering both nave and chancel. It is substantially 15th or early 16th-century work, with eight bays in the common local form. The roof structure features high arch-braced collar beams with a quatrefoil and two trefoils above each collar, two purlins each side with cusped braces, and ashlars to all the common rafters. The nave floor is of stone flags. One step up at the screen leads to the wood-blocked chancel, and another step at the altar rails leads to the sanctuary paved in encaustic tiles.

The outstanding feature of the interior is an exceptionally complete rood screen and loft in late-Gothic style with Perpendicular details. The loft projects more than a metre on both east and west sides, is floored with planks and retains the central socket on the west side where the rood itself formerly stood. The loft soffit is panelled in two rows of eight panels each side, with four-leaved flowers as bosses at the rib intersections. The screen itself has five open compartments to left and right with a central opening treated as two compartments separated only by a short pendant post. Below the mid-rail are pierced panels that do not align with those above.

The whole is executed with fine decorative detail. On the chancel side there is a moulded top rail, ovolo loft gallery standards with miniature tracery panels in the heads, and a heavily moulded bottom rail with a full-width vine trail. Above the bottom rail is a cresting of crossletted crosses in front of the standards. The nave side follows a similar design but with simplification: there is no cresting and instead of a vine, a briar trail with wild roses appears. The mid-rail is decorated with spaced four-leaved flowers and the lowest panels are variously carved in tracery designs.

The 19th-century furnishings include pine altar rails with arched supports and no gate, plain pine choirstalls and similar pews. To the left of the nave stands a large octagonal pulpit carved in Gothic style. The altar is of oak, carved in Gothic style with a central IHS monogram. An octagonal font stands at the west of the nave, and a small dug-out parish chest is also present.

The south window of the chancel depicts the Nativity, the Resurrection and the Ascension with small figures. It was made by James Powell & Sons to the design of H E Wooldridge and given by R Wynne of Bachymbyd and Meyarth in memory of his parents in 1869. The adjacent sanctuary window was given by the Rev. R J Roberts in 1860.

A memorial with broken pediment and hatchment above on a cartouche commemorates Elizabeth Price (1755) behind the pulpit. Other wall monuments in the chancel range from the mid-18th century to the 20th century.