St John the Baptist's Church, Pilling facts for kids

Quick facts for kids St John the Baptist's Church, Pilling
St John the Baptist's Church, Pilling, from the northeast
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OS grid reference	SD 402,486
Location	Pilling, Lancashire
Country	England
Denomination	Anglican
Website	St John the Baptist, Pilling
History
Status	Parish church
Dedication	John the Baptist
Architecture
Functional status	Active
Heritage designation	Grade II*
Designated	17 April 1967
Architect(s)	Paley and Austin
Architectural type	Church
Style	Gothic Revival
Groundbreaking	1886
Completed	1887
Construction cost	£7,000
Specifications
Materials	Sandstone, slate roofs
Administration
Parish	Stalmine, St James
Deanery	Garstang
Archdeaconry	Lancaster
Diocese	Blackburn
Province	York

St John the Baptist's Church is located in the village of Pilling, which is in Lancashire, England. It is a church that is still used today by the Anglican faith. It serves as a parish church, which means it is the main church for a local area.

The church is part of the Garstang deanery, the Lancaster archdeaconry, and the diocese of Blackburn. These are all different levels of organization within the Church of England. The building is very important, so it is listed as a Grade II* listed building on the National Heritage List for England. This means it is a particularly important building of special interest. The church is also connected with St James, Stalmine, and St Mark, Eagland Hill. Experts describe it as a great example of a church built in the late Gothic Revival style, with many unique details.

Church History

This church was built between 1886 and 1887. It replaced an older church, also called Church of St John the Baptist, which was about 150 meters (164 yards) north of the new site.

The church was designed by a famous architectural company from Lancaster called Paley and Austin. It cost about £7,000 to build back then. This amount would be worth around £990,000 today! The church was designed to hold 410 people. A well-known expert on buildings, Nikolaus Pevsner, was very impressed by the architects, saying they were incredibly creative. Later, in 1919–20, Henry Paley, who was also part of the same architectural firm, designed a war memorial for the churchyard. This memorial stands 26 feet (8 meters) tall.

Church Design and Features

Outside the Church

St John's Church is built from a type of stone called snecked sandstone rubble. Its roofs are made of slate. The church's layout includes a long main hall called a nave with five sections. It also has a clerestory, which is a row of windows above the main part of the church, and aisles on both the north and south sides. There is a porch on the south side where people enter.

The church also has a chancel, which is the area around the altar, with two sections. On the north side of the chancel is a vestry, a room used by the clergy, which looks like a transept (a part of the church that crosses the nave). On the south side, there's a room for the organ. At the west end of the church, there is a tower with a tall, pointed roof called a spire.

The tower has strong corner supports called buttresses and a top edge that looks like a castle wall, called a battlemented parapet. This parapet is decorated with a special pattern called flushwork, using purple and light brown sandstone. This decoration continues along the clerestory windows. At the very top of the tower, there are openings with two lights (windows) for the bells. These openings have pointed tops with decorative stone patterns called tracery. The large window at the west end of the church has eight lights and also features pointed tops with tracery.

The south porch has two levels and also has corner buttresses and flushwork decoration. The windows in the aisles have three lights each. The large window at the east end of the church has five lights and features Perpendicular tracery, which is a specific style of stone pattern.

Inside the Church

Inside, you can see the bare sandstone walls, and the roof is made of open timber beams. The rows of arches, called arcades, are supported by eight-sided pillars called piers. In the chancel, there is a double sedilia, which is a set of seats for the clergy, and a piscina, a basin used for washing sacred vessels.

The beautiful stained glass windows at the east and west ends of the church were made in the late 1800s. In the northwest aisle, there is a window showing Saint Margaret, created in 1911 by E. H. Jewitt. In the south aisle, another window by A. L. Moore shows characters from the Bible story of Ruth: Boaz, Ruth, and Naomi.

The church organ has two manuals (keyboards) and was built in 1903, but we don't know for sure who built it. It was cleaned and repaired in 1998 by David Wells from Liverpool. The church also has a set of six bells. All of these bells were made by a company called John Taylor & Co at different times between 1934 and 1983.

More Information

• List of ecclesiastical works by Paley and Austin