Church of St Nicholas, Bradfield

The Church of St Nicholas at High Bradfield occupies one of the most spectacular settings of any church in England — perched some 850 feet above sea level on a hillside six miles north-west of Sheffield, overlooking the moors and reservoirs of the Peak District National Park. A Grade I listed building, one of only five in the whole city of Sheffield, it is a fine medieval church of local gritstone whose history reaches back through the Norman period to the age of the Anglo-Saxon saints. With its commanding views, its ancient Saxon cross and its surviving Norman fabric, Bradfield Church is one of the treasures of the South Yorkshire moors.

Christian worship in the Bradfield area dates from at least the ninth century, as is proved by a Saxon cross discovered in 1870 in the nearby village of Low Bradfield, which specialists dated to that time. The Normans regarded the area as strategically important, building a motte-and-bailey castle here after the Conquest, and the local historian John Wilson believed that the original Norman church was founded in 1109, a date he deciphered from ancient writing in the church's old east window. William de Lovetot, Lord of Hallamshire, built the church of St Mary at Ecclesfield to the east at the end of the eleventh century, and St Nicholas at Bradfield became a chapel of ease to it, remaining so until 1868, when it became a parish in its own right.

The original Norman church was a simple two-cell building, to which a square bell-tower was added in the fourteenth century. In the 1480s the church was largely rebuilt in the Perpendicular Gothic style, using some of the original gritstone masonry, and it is this late-medieval church that survives today. Like so many churches, its interior was drastically changed during the religious upheavals of the seventeenth century, when, under the influence of the Puritans during the Civil War, statues, wall paintings and stained glass were destroyed and the walls whitewashed. These changes were reversed in the later nineteenth century, when the interior was restored to something of its fifteenth-century appearance.

Despite the rebuildings, parts of the original Norman church survive — in the north arcade, the font, and the chancel arch — precious relics of the twelfth-century building. The church's most ancient treasure, however, is the ninth-century Saxon cross, which was integrated into the north wall of the church in 1886. Roughly fashioned in local gritstone and decorated with five bosses on its head — the Saxon way of depicting the Crucifixion — it is a moving link to the very earliest Christianity of the area, far older than any other part of the church. The parish registers date from 1559, and the church's music, originally provided by a local band of musicians with bassoon and cello accompanying the choir, was taken over by an organ in 1843; the present organ dates from 1973.

The churchyard, on its steep hillside, is a place of great atmosphere, with sweeping views over Bradfield Dale and the moors, and it contains a watch-house built in the early nineteenth century to guard against the body-snatchers who, in that grim age, robbed graves to sell corpses for dissection. Beside the church rises the great earthwork of Bailey Hill, the Norman motte, adding to the sense of deep history that surrounds the site.

Today St Nicholas continues as an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Sheffield, serving the scattered moorland communities of Bradfield. Its hilltop position, its Grade I listing and its ancient fabric make it one of the most rewarding churches to visit in the region, a place where history and landscape come together in spectacular fashion.

The church stands at High Bradfield, on the edge of the Peak District National Park, amid some of the finest moorland scenery in South Yorkshire. The reservoirs of Bradfield Dale, including the Dale Dyke reservoir whose dam burst in 1864 to cause the catastrophic Great Sheffield Flood — many of whose victims lie buried at Bradfield — lie below the church; the open moors and edges of the Peak District stretch away to the west; and the city of Sheffield, with its steel heritage and its parks, lies to the south-east.

From a ninth-century Saxon cross and a Norman church of the early twelfth century, through the great Perpendicular rebuilding of the 1480s, the Puritan upheavals and the Victorian restoration, the Church of St Nicholas gathers more than a thousand years of history into one building high above the moors. A Grade I listed church with one of the most magnificent settings in England, it remains the living parish church of Bradfield — a hilltop treasure overlooking the Peak District.