Church of St Michael and All Angels, Beckwithshaw

The Church of St Michael and All Angels, Beckwithshaw, in North Yorkshire, also known simply as Beckwithshaw Church, is an Anglican church built and furnished between 1886 and 1887 by the architect William Swinden Barber in the Gothic Revival style as part of the Arts and Crafts movement, with stained glass in the same spirit added in 1892. A Grade II listed building, it long stood as a pristine and unchanged example of an Arts and Crafts church, retaining every original furnishing but a single missing statue, until planning permission granted in 2018 allowed alterations including the removal of Barber's original pews.

When the church was built, Beckwithshaw was a little hamlet about two and a half miles from Harrogate, its ecclesiastical district carved out of the parish of Pannal. A newspaper of 1886 caught the scene: in the immense sweep of lonely country between Harrogate and Otley, with its very few habitations, "the eye rests with a sense of relief upon the newly-erected edifice at Beckwithshaw." Before the church existed, the congregation had to travel to All Saints at Harlow Hill and later make do with a local school room. The whole project was the gift of one couple: Dr Henry Williams and his wife Ellen of Moor Park House, the 1859 mansion they had acquired in 1882, whose household and estate employed many local people until the late 1970s. They built the church entirely at their own expense, spending £8,000 on the building with a £5,000 endowment, and in later years added a vicarage, the church furnishings and the village institute. Mrs Williams insisted there be no graveyard at the church, a decision perhaps coloured by the period's anxieties about burial: in 1888 a Beckwithshaw schoolmaster's young wife, buried at Woodhouse Cemetery, was exhumed after the gravedigger claimed to have heard knocking and rattling from her coffin, though the inquest found no disturbance and returned a verdict of natural causes.

The foundation stone was laid on 29 September 1884, the feast of St Michael and, happily, Mrs Williams' birthday, and the completed church was consecrated at Michaelmas, 29 September 1886, by Mrs Williams' own uncle, the Bishop of Ripon, who consecrated a second St Michael and All Angels at Cottingley the same afternoon. Though Beckwithshaw was a mere hamlet of scattered farmhouses, the church was filled, with a grand procession of robed choir, churchwardens including Henry Williams himself, the bishop in full vestments, and a long train of clergy including the Deans of Cork and Dromore. The organ was not yet installed, so a Miss Burnley played a harmonium, the local choir having been trained by the new choirmaster Mr Halliwell, and the collection of £11 13s went to the Wakefield Bishopric Fund.

Barber, a Halifax architect whose listed works include at least fifteen other Anglican Gothic Revival churches in West Yorkshire, designed not only the building but all its interior decoration and furnishings, and the contractor was James Simpson of Harrogate. The church is built of local sandstone from Killinghall quarry, deliberately modelled on the medieval St Robert's Church at Pannal, though with its tower attached at the south-west and a purpose-built organ chamber and vestry that the mother church lacks; the donors wanted nothing elaborate for this countryside spot, settling on what the press called a neat, plain and substantial structure, well furnished and in every respect suitable as a parish church. The interior, lined with dressed local stone and seating 120 to 150, was enriched with carving by William Pashley of Harrogate and Leeds in Caen stone: the pulpit, the font, and the reredos with its sculptured panels of the Bearing of the Cross, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection beneath moulded and crocketed canopies. The choir stalls and nave seats were of oak with sunk traceried panels and foliated ends, the altar rail and gas standards of wrought brass, the floors tiled in simple patterns. A carved group of St Michael overcoming the Dragon once stood between the west windows of the nave, perhaps also Pashley's work; it is the one original furnishing now missing.

The stained glass is by Charles Eamer Kempe, among the most celebrated Victorian glass artists. The east window of 1886 depicts St Michael and All Angels, the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi, and the west window the archangels Gabriel, Uriel, Michael and Raphael. On 26 June 1892 five further Kempe windows, given by Henry Williams, John Dugdale and Master J. Appleyard-Williams, were dedicated before a large congregation: a remarkable apocalyptic cycle drawn from St John's visions on Patmos, showing the angel measuring the holy city of Jerusalem with a golden reed, St John repelled from worshipping at the angel's feet by the River of Life, the angel with one foot on sea and one on earth holding the little book, the angel with the key of the Bottomless Pit chaining the subdued Dragon, the angel reaping grapes for the winepress of the Wrath of God, the angel casting the great millstone into the sea, and angels of proclamation and incense before the Golden Altar.

The tower, its shape echoing Pannal's fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century tower but with an external stair to the ringers' chamber, holds six bells cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1886 by Mears and Stainbank, hung for full circle ringing and each bearing the name of a member of the donor family: Joshua, John, Annie, Mary, Ellen and Henry, the tenor weighing just over thirteen hundredweight. They hang in a massive two-tier hardwood frame that fills the tiny bell chamber so exactly that the bells fit only because their wheels are turned in different directions, the floors of the tower probably installed after the bells were winched up; a ringing band still practises on Monday evenings. The organ, installed on 20 December 1887 as a further gift from Mrs Williams, is by the great "Father" Willis of London, a two-manual instrument in a handsome oak case with spotted metal pipes, housed in a lean-to chamber against the chancel's north wall that was part of the original design, its pipes peering through a specially cut arch; its stops remain entirely original, and the Bishop of Ripon returned for its opening day.

The first vicar, from 1887 to 1894, was the Reverend Charles Farrar Forster, a man of fragile health who had exchanged busy St Andrew's, Huddersfield, for this quiet parish in hope of recovery; an assiduous parish worker, able preacher and fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he died in office and lies at Harlow Hill Cemetery beneath a once-striking black and white marble cross. His successor Herbert R. Stott served fifty-one years, from 1894 to 1945, spanning the church's 1936 jubilee, celebrated with a special service and a £360 renovation of fabric and organ; Stott's son Philip, head boy of St Bees and exhibitioner of Merton College, Oxford, was killed in the First World War in April 1918 and is named on the Tyne Cot and Beckwithshaw memorials. Since 1980 Beckwithshaw has shared its vicar with Pannal in a joint benefice, with regular Sunday services, a junior church in term time and a monthly pram service continuing the life of the little Arts and Crafts church that the Williamses of Moor Park built complete, down to the last carved panel, on the lonely heights between Harrogate and Otley.