Old St John the Baptist's Church is a redundant

Anglican Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of th ...

church in the village of Pilling, Lancashire, England. It stands to the south of the new church, also dedicated to St John the Baptist. The church is "an unusual survival of a small

Georgian Georgian may refer to: Common meanings * Anything related to, or originating from Georgia (country) ** Georgians, an indigenous Caucasian ethnic group ** Georgian language, a Kartvelian language spoken by Georgians **Georgian scripts, three scrip ...

church". It is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II* listed building, and it is under the care of the Churches Conservation Trust.

History

The village was originally served by a small medieval chapel ( by ), serviced until the Dissolution by the canons of Cockersand Abbey. In 1716 the parishioners of Pilling petitioned the Bishop of Chester for a new church. In response, St John's was built in 1717. The only structural alteration since then was the raising of the walls in 1813 to accommodate galleries. It became redundant when the new church was built in 1887. The church was

vested In law, vesting is the point in time when the rights and interests arising from legal ownership of a property is acquired by some person. Vesting creates an immediately secured right of present or future deployment. One has a vested right to an ...

in the Trust on 1 August 1986. St John's is termed a chapel, rather than a church, due to its being a parochial

chapelry A chapelry was a subdivision of an ecclesiastical parish in England and parts of Lowland Scotland up to the mid 19th century. Status It had a similar status to a township but was so named as it had a chapel of ease (chapel) which was the communi ...

in the parish of

Garstang Garstang is an ancient market town and civil parish within the Wyre borough of Lancashire, England. It is north of the city of Preston and the same distance south of Lancaster. In 2011, the parish had a total resident population of 4,268 ...

, served by a perpetual curate as opposed to a vicar.

Architecture

Exterior

The church is constructed in red sandstone, with a plinth,

chamfer A chamfer or is a transitional edge between two faces of an object. Sometimes defined as a form of bevel, it is often created at a 45° angle between two adjoining right-angled faces. Chamfers are frequently used in machining, carpentry, fu ...

ed quoins, and other dressings in grey sandstone. The roof is

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade regional metamorphism. It is the finest grained foliated metamorphic rock. ...

. It is a simple building, long and low. On the west gable is a double bellcote. The church has five

bays A bay is a recessed, coastal body of water that directly connects to a larger main body of water, such as an ocean, a lake, or another bay. A large bay is usually called a gulf, sea, sound, or bight. A cove is a small, circular bay with a narr ...

. On the south front is a single row of windows with round heads and a single chamfered mullion. In the westernmost bay is a door over which is a smaller similar window, but with no mullion. The door has a keystone inscribed with the date 1717, over which is a sandstone

sundial A sundial is a horological device that tells the time of day (referred to as civil time in modern usage) when direct sunlight shines by the apparent position of the Sun in the sky. In the narrowest sense of the word, it consists of a flat ...

with a plaque including the date 1766. The east window is similar to the windows in the south wall, but with two mullions. The north wall has two tiers of five windows; the lower windows have flat

lintels A lintel or lintol is a type of beam (a horizontal structural element) that spans openings such as portals, doors, windows and fireplaces. It can be a decorative architectural element, or a combined ornamented structural item. In the case of w ...

, and the upper row consists of

lunette A lunette (French ''lunette'', "little moon") is a half-moon shaped architectural space, variously filled with sculpture, painted, glazed, filled with recessed masonry, or void. A lunette may also be segmental, and the arch may be an arc take ...

windows.

Interior

The interior has a flat plaster ceiling. The walls are whitewashed and the church is floored with stone flags. There are galleries on the north and west sides, carried on Tuscan-style columns, and on the ground floor there are fixed simple oak benches, box pews (one of which carries the date 1719), and a two-decker

pulpit A pulpit is a raised stand for preachers in a Christian church. The origin of the word is the Latin ''pulpitum'' (platform or staging). The traditional pulpit is raised well above the surrounding floor for audibility and visibility, access ...

. The sandstone

font In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a "sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

dates from the 18th century and is in the shape of an urn. The Royal coat of arms of King George I dated 1719 are displayed in a hatchment. Before the alteration of the roof in 1813, the chapel was open to the rafters. The pulpit was originally three-tier and was located against the north wall.Weston, Dr. D., (2006), ''St John the Baptist's Old Church, Pilling, Lancashire'', The Churches Conservation Trust, 2nd edition, printed 1989

External features

The churchyard contains the war graves of two soldiers and a

merchant sailor Maritime transport (or ocean transport) and hydraulic effluvial transport, or more generally waterborne transport, is the transport of people (passengers) or goods (cargo) via waterways. Freight transport by sea has been widely used throug ...

of World War I.

References