Built from designs by Edward Paley for Richard Gillow of Leighton Hall, and outdoing the local Anglican church in size, prominence and architectural quality. Attached predecessor chapel and late seventeenth/early eighteenth century presbytery.

A mission was established at Yealand Conyers in 1782, serving Leighton Hall (home successively of the Middletons, Hodgsons, Towneleys, Worswicks and Gillows) and its Catholic tenantry. The old church is incorporated into the adjoining presbytery. In 1852 Edward Paley was employed by R. T. Gillow to build the present church.

Description

Please refer to the list description, below. Additional points:

Outside the west front of the church is a railed off area where members of the Gillow family are interred.

Interior: Elaborately carved reredos and altar with marble colonettes, traceried altar rail of alabaster with green marble columns and polished metal gates. Family pew of the Gillows at the northwest end of the nave, with nearby a row of brasses with arms and names of the Gillow family, probably late nineteenth century but including earlier members. Box pews with bench ends with rearing poppy heads. Stained glass in east window only, showing the Virgin and crowned female saints, perhaps by Hardman.

The presbytery is attached by a low link. It originated in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, as the blocked mullioned window shows. Attached to it is the predecessor chapel, with a blocked window with a pointed arch away from the main road.

List description

II

Roman Catholic Church, 1852, by Paley. Squared limestone with limestone dressings and steep slate roof. Comprises a nave, a lower chancel and a north porch. North nave wall has 4 windows of plate tracery, each having 2 cusped lancets and a trefoil. Chancel wall has 4 lancets with hoods. East wall has diagonal buttresses and 3 stepped lancets with hoods. Porch has a deeply moulded doorway with a statue of the Virgin above in a carved sand- stone niche. The west wall has diagonal buttresses and a central bay projecting with offsets, with a central buttress and 2 tall cusped lights. This central bay is terminated by 2 gabled bell openings. The south nave wall has 5 cusped lancets. Interior. 5-bay nave has open timber roof with long scissor braces, ashlaring and side purlins. Chancel arch is of moulded sand-stone, springing from columns carried on foliated corbels.

Heritage Details