RAINOW † Jenkin Chapel (St John)
Near Saltersford Hall, 2m/3km E. of Rainow; 3m/4km N.E. of Macclesfield
OS SJ983765 GPS 53.2863N, 2.0257W
This remote mountain chapel built in 1733 looks like a converted farmhouse; a low tower was added to the gable end in 1755. The roof is of heavy Kerridge slabs, the windows are square, sash and domestic, and there is a chimney stack halfway along the S. wall. The gallery, box pews and fittings are intact.
ROSTHERNE † St Mary
2m/3km S.W. of Altrincham
OS SJ742836 GPS 53.3495N, 2.3880W
In a large churchyard beautifully set between village and mere, the church is mainly Perpendicular outside, with a handsome Georgian tower of 1742–4. The chief delights here are the monuments: a 13th-century knight, a spirited wall monument to Samuel Egerton, dated 1792, by Bacon, and an affecting sculpture by Richard Westmacott Jnr of local woman Charlotte Lucy Beatrix Egerton, who drowned in Rostherne Mere on the eve of her wedding in 1845; an angel kneels over her recumbent figure.
SHOCKLACH † St Edith
6m/10km E. of Wrexham
OS SJ431501 GPS 53.0459N, 2.8490W
This is a small rustic church in the fields, with a double bellcote on the W. wall. The Norman S. doorway is crudely decorated with zigzags and lozenges. The church dates from at least the mid-12th century, but is perhaps Saxon in origin. The chancel was added in the 14th century. Inside are good, plain fittings and a pleasing 18th-century nave ceiling with rosettes; scratched on a pane of glass originally in the E. window, ‘I, Robert Aldersey was here on 1st day of October 1756 along with John Massie and Mr Derbyshire. The roads were so bad we were in danger of our lives.’
TUSHINGHAM † Old St Chad Chapel of Ease
4m/6km N. of Whitchurch
OS SJ527462 GPS 53.0117N, 2.7057W
Along a field path, half a mile E. of the Victorian church and parsonage which replaced it, the brick chapel of 1689–91 stands in a numinous oval enclosure. The superb interior has many things fashioned from Cheshire oak, including the W. Vaudrey gallery, decorated roof trusses, chancel screen, panelled pulpit, altar table with high-backed family pew to either side, and even an oak font!
WINWICK † St Oswald
3m/4km N. of Warrington
OS SJ603928 GPS 53.4308N, 2.5978W
St Oswald’s is mostly 14th-century, with a buttressed tower and large spire, and has richly panelled 16th-century roofs in the nave and S. chapel. The celebrated chancel is in the Decorated style, added by A. W. N. Pugin in 1847–8, with richly decorated barrel-vaulted ceiling and sedilia. Ornate iron screens separate the E. end chapels from the nave. In the Legh Chapel are good 16th–19th-century monuments, and part of a Saxon cross is in the Gerard Chapel. The enigmatic Winwick Pig, carved on the exterior of the tower next to a niche, is perhaps an emblem of St Anthony.
WRENBURY † St Margaret
5m/8km S.W. of Nantwich
OS SJ593477 GPS 53.0257N, 2.6073W
St Margaret’s is an early 16th-century Perpendicular church that overlooks a village green, its tower, nave and aisles all conspicuously battlemented. The interior is pleasing, and must have been very fine indeed before the renovations of the 1920s and 30s. The pink masonry looks, however, less scraped than is usual when the plaster is removed, and the box pews, though lowered, are of a good colour. There are crests on pew doors, hatchments, some signed monuments and a W. gallery.
ST IVES: ST IA – one of four similarly styled angels in the roof of the church’s north aisle
Cornwall is a Duchy, separated from England by the picturesque Tamar Valley, and has more sea coast than anywhere else in Britain. The prevailing building materials are slate and granite. The granite bursts up through the slate and forms Bodmin Moor, which is mostly desolate except for prehistoric remains and the beehive cells of Celtic Christians. A district of half-granite and half-great white pyramids of decomposed granite, known as China clay, is near St Austell. Moorland covers the far western granite promontory between St Ives and Land’s End. The Scilly Isles, where the churches are small, simple and comparatively new, are the nearly submerged tops of granite hills, between which and Land’s End was the lost territory of the Lyonesse.
The rest of the county is slate, varying from bluish silver to deep green. The peninsula of the Lizard is made of coloured rocks called Serpentine. Tin mines have brought 19th-century industrial scenery, with its chapels and streets, to the districts around Camborne and Redruth. Visitors of our own generation have pocked the tremendous coast with bungalows, but they have also preserved the humble slate-grey fishing ports because of their picturesque qualities. The two most attractive inland towns in Cornwall are Launceston, a border fortress to which have been added Georgian houses, and Truro, where Pearson’s noble Victorian cathedral rises in the French manner out of the old houses and shops. Truro has its Georgian streets and so have Helston, Penzance and Falmouth. Calstock, on the border with Devon, is the least-known and most uninterruptedly Cornish town. The Duchy becomes its native self in winter, and that is the time to see it.
Inland, Cornwall is mercifully considered dull. The wooded valleys like those of the Allen, Camel, Inny, Fowey and Lynher, with their steep slopes of thin Cornish elms, carpeted underneath with spring anemones, their slate-hung houses, whose gardens in summer are bright with hydrangea, veronica and fuchsia, are remotest and loveliest Cornwall. The coast is awe-inspiring. Rocks fall sheer into the peacock-blue Atlantic and English Channel, and rock pools are full of many-coloured seaweeds and marine life.
Before Southern England was Christian, Cornwall had been visited by Celtic missionaries from Wales and Ireland. Their names survive as those of saints, though little is known about many of them. The Cornish are the same sort of Celts as the Welsh and Bretons, but the Celtic field system makes the Duchy look different from England. The Celtic saints were hermits who lived in beehive cells and are said to have recited the Psalms waist-deep in cold streams. The crosses of their age survive, and so does the siting of their churches, for the parochial system came late to Cornwall, and the church on the site of a Celtic hermit’s cell is often remote from the chief village in the parish. It is in the larger villages that one finds the chapels of Methodism, which has made as deep an impression on Cornwall as it has on Wales.
The old Cornish churches are rugged and windswept, and their charm is in their storm-resisting construction and their lichen-crusted texture. The Cornish historian T. S. Attlee (who contributed to an earlier edition of this book) thought that the rather unenterprising nature of Cornish churches, which were nearly all rebuilt or added to on the same pattern in the 15th century, was for two main reasons. The first reason was that the local stone was hard to work. Cornwall is deficient in lime and so the mason used mud, and walls had therefore to be kept low. Roofs had to be barrel-vaulted so as to distribute their weight evenly along the walls. This sort of roof suited a boat-building people and their tools – the adze and spokeshave. Hence Cornishmen never reached realization of wall and window, voids and solids, as a composition. They stuck at the stage of regarding them as an aggregate of lumps with holes left in it, as did their Celtic forebears. The second reason was that most Cornishmen made their living from the sea, so they saw no pattern in