Church of St Peter and St Paul, Ormskirk

The Church of St Peter and St Paul is the ancient parish church of the market town of Ormskirk, in West Lancashire. A building of medieval origin and great local importance, it is famous for a remarkable architectural curiosity — it is one of only three churches in all England to have both a tower and a spire, and the only one to have them both at the same end of the building. A Grade II* listed building in the Diocese of Liverpool, it is also the burial place of the Earls of Derby, one of the great families of the north-west.

A church has stood at Ormskirk since at least the twelfth century, and probably since Saxon times, serving a wide parish that once included Lathom, Burscough, Bickerstaffe, Scarisbrick and Skelmersdale. The earliest surviving part of the building is the north wall of the chancel, dating from about 1170 and retaining a heavily restored Norman window, while two arches on the south of the chancel date from around 1280. The fifteenth-century steeple followed, and the Scarisbrick Chapel is also probably of that century.

The church's most distinctive feature, the large west tower, was built around 1540–50 — and it owes its existence to the Dissolution of the Monasteries. When nearby Burscough Priory was suppressed under Henry VIII around 1536, its four bells needed a home, and the new tower was raised at Ormskirk to house them, standing alongside the existing steeple to give the church its unique double silhouette of tower and spire at the same end. The steeple is one of a distinctive group of four local spires that rise from a square base to an octagonal spire by way of a broached belfry, reaching some 109 feet, while the great square tower stands about 84 feet high, with diagonal buttresses, a crenellated parapet and crocketed pinnacles.

Much of the church's detail is the result of Victorian restoration. The nave had been rebuilt in a neoclassical style in 1729, but this was almost entirely swept away between 1877 and 1891 in an extensive restoration by the celebrated Lancaster architects Paley and Austin, who rebuilt the arcades in the Gothic style, renewed the windows, re-roofed and reseated the church, and removed the galleries — work that gives the interior much of its present Perpendicular Gothic character. The visiting American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who saw the church in the 1850s, thought it "not exactly a venerable aspect, being too good in repair, and much restored". Inside, the nave has a fine wooden ceiling with carved hammerbeam trusses and five-bay arcades on moulded piers.

The church's chief glory is its association with the House of Stanley, the Earls of Derby, whose seat was nearby at Lathom and Knowsley. The Derby Chapel, built in the later sixteenth century and enclosed by a seventeenth-century wooden screen with wrought-iron cresting, contains three alabaster effigies — probably of Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, and his two wives — and a remarkable succession of the Earls of Derby are buried here, from the 3rd to the 11th Earl. Among them is James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby, the Royalist commander executed at Bolton after the Civil War. The tower holds a ring of eight bells cast in 1948, alongside a historic bell of 1576 no longer in use, and the churchyard contains the war graves of service personnel of both World Wars and the grave of a Victoria Cross recipient of the Boer War.

A Grade II* listed building standing on raised ground in the north-west of the town, St Peter and St Paul remains the active parish church of Ormskirk. From its Norman beginnings and the steeple and tower that give it its singular profile, through its bells rescued from Burscough Priory and its tombs of the Earls of Derby, to its Victorian restoration by Paley and Austin, the church gathers the long history of Ormskirk and its great families into one distinctive and much-loved building.