Whalley St Mary and All Saints

Back in the 1980s I was writing regularly for a Lancashire-based magazine and had a series of articles called "John Burke's Curious Lancashire" that featured half a dozen or so images from around the county with a bit of text covering the sort of antiquities and rarities that most people would pass by without a thought.

This is the church of St Mary and All Saints at Whalley in the Ribble Valley. Already mentioned for its abbey ruins on these pages, Whalley also has an interesting church, built on the site of or as an enlargement of a Norman church of the 11th century which itself was built on the site of an even earlier Anglo-Saxon church mentioned in the Domesday Book. Remnants of both earlier churches stand in its churchyard and fragments that are built into its walls.

This is one of three Saxon crosses to be found in the sunshine close by the church door. You can also find them in rain, snow and fog (not as easily in fog...) but they do look better in sunshine and I was lucky on this visit!

Equally so on an earlier visit, this photograph dating from 1983 and one of several taken for the magazine work. It was rare for magazines to use colour photos in those days apart from on the cover. The Saxon crosses have lost the actual arms of the cross, but the surviving shafts have carvings placed there by stonemasons in the 10th or 11th century.

The current church was built mostly in the 13th century, the tower added in the 15th century and the south porch in 1844. Subsequent restorations and additions took place in the 1860s and in 1909. Inside, the stalls were carved in 1430 and came from the Abbey after the Dissolution. They have the name of the carver, Mr Eatough.

The octagonal chunky font of gritstone dates from the 15th century and has marks suggesting that a lock was fitted in the 16th century, quite possibly to stop the local witches from trying to steal the Holy Water. We are in Pendle country here...

Coming back out of the church I found this old stone coffin.

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Whalley Abbey, Lancashire

August 1983. This time we are in Whalley to visit the remains of the abbey that once thrived here.

It was a Cistercian Abbey dating from the end of the 13th century. It was in 1296 that the monks of Stanlow Abbey on the River Mersey moved here. The Stanlow Abbey had been hit by floods and fires and a tower brought down by gales.

Whalley's abbey has an impressive gatehouse, said to be one of the most haunted buildings in England. The abbey church is not in quite as good condition, just foundations can be seen poking through the grass that has been cultivated where the floor of the church once was. There are more substantial remains of the other abbey buildings.

The building of the church and abbey took place from 1296 to 1440. Permission was granted in 1339 for a crenellated surrounding wall to be built around the grounds.

In 1537 it was closed as part of Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries. The last Abbot, John Paslew, was executed for High Treason, due to his activities in the Pilgrimage of Grace when the North of England rose up against the King's (or more properly Thomas Cromwell's) reforms. In addition the Northerners were angry at the way Queen Catherine of Aragon had been set aside and whilst few may have mourned the beheading of Queen Anne Boleyn on trumped up charges, the exectution of his second queen did Henry no favours with his northern subjects.

The lands of the Abbey were eventually bought back by the Diocese of Manchester in 1923, passing to the Diocese of Blackburn in 1926 and it was used as a centre for religious education there. More recently it has been used as a conference centre.

The monks' washing trough - ooh... luxury!

The octagonal chapter house stood here and there are still some of the original medieval floor tiles in situ.

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