Church of St Fimbarrus Or St Nicholas

The Church of St Fimbarrus presides over the steep little streets of Fowey, the ancient seafaring town on Cornwall's south coast, and carries one of the more exotic dedications in English church history. Its patron is St Finbarr, the Irish monk and first Bishop of Cork, a reminder of the Celtic Christian world that once bound Ireland, Wales and Cornwall together by sea. Known simply to most as Fowey Parish Church, it serves the Church of England's Diocese of Truro and is protected as a Grade I listed building.

The present church was raised in the early fourteenth century on the site of an earlier Norman building, and was rededicated in 1336. Its position at the mouth of one of Cornwall's busiest harbours brought both prosperity and peril. Fowey's mariners — the notorious "Fowey Gallants" — raided French shipping throughout the Hundred Years' War, and in 1457 the French exacted their revenge, descending on the town and damaging the church. Repairs followed swiftly in 1460 under the patronage of the Earl of Warwick, the "Kingmaker" of the Wars of the Roses, when the clerestory and the north and south aisles were rebuilt. The result is a spacious interior of nave and two unusually wide aisles beneath a clerestory, crowned by an exceptionally fine fifteenth-century carved wagon roof that ranks among the best in Cornwall. The south porch is a small architectural treasure in itself, with open arches to west and east and a vaulted roof of eight ribs. The tower came last, in the sixteenth century: four stages high, braced with buttresses and enriched with bands of carved ornament, it remains one of the grandest in the county and a landmark for vessels entering the harbour.

Older fragments survived the rebuilding. The font is Norman, cut from Catacleuze stone — a dark elvan quarried near St Endellion — and closely resembles the fonts of Ladock, Feock and St Mewan. The hexagonal pulpit was made in 1601. The church is especially rich in monuments to the Rashleighs, the merchant dynasty whose fortunes were built on Fowey's trade: brasses of the mid-fifteenth century are joined by memorials to John Rashleigh (1582) and Alice Rashleigh (1602), and by two particularly interesting later monuments, one to John Rashleigh of about 1610 and another of 1683. In a curious episode of civic improvisation, the church itself served as Fowey's town hall for a period ending in 1684.

The church has its literary associations too. In 1899 Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows, married Elspeth Thompson here — Fowey's river and harbour are often claimed as part of the inspiration for his riverbank world. And in the churchyard lies Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863–1944), the celebrated man of letters known as "Q", who lived at Fowey for half a century and immortalised the town as "Troy Town" in his novels.

The music of the church matches its architecture. A new organ of 1855, equipped with German pedals, was replaced in 1877 by an instrument built by Grover and Grover of London, subsequently worked on by Hele and Co of Plymouth in 1892, enlarged to three manuals by Wadsworth in 1905, and further rebuilt by Hele (1948, 1972) and Lance Foy (2001, 2006). Today it stands as a three-manual instrument of thirty-three speaking stops. The tower holds a ring of eight bells, the tenor weighing 876 kilograms.

Recent decades have brought the church national attention of a different kind. An evangelical congregation, Fowey had passed a resolution rejecting the leadership of women; in 2019 its vicar and half the congregation departed to found a conservative evangelical church in the town outside the Church of England, under the auspices of GAFCON. In 2023 a newly elected parochial church council voted unanimously to rescind the resolution — Fowey had been among some 150 parishes nationally to hold one — and to open the vacancy to candidates of either sex. In March 2024 the church welcomed the Reverend Carol Edleston as Priest for Fowey, opening a new chapter in the long story of St Fimbarrus's, nearly seven centuries after its rededication.