Parish Church of St Mary

The Church of St Mary the Virgin is the Anglican parish church of Richmond, the handsome market town at the gateway to Swaledale in North Yorkshire. A Grade II* listed building of medieval origin, set on a hillside that slopes down to the River Swale on the eastern edge of the town, St Mary's has served the people of Richmond for the best part of nine hundred years. With its fourteenth-century tower, its links to the famous Green Howards regiment, and a churchyard that holds a plague pit and the graves of soldiers who fought at Waterloo, it gathers a great deal of Yorkshire history into one building below the walls of Richmond's Norman castle.

The church's origins lie in the twelfth century. Parts of the nave and aisles date from the middle of the 1100s, and although the many later renovations have much altered the building, it is believed to have begun as a cruciform Norman church. From early times the patronage of St Mary's belonged to the great Benedictine house of St Mary's Abbey in York, one of the wealthiest abbeys in the north of England; at the Dissolution of the Monasteries the patronage passed to the Crown, and later it came into the hands of the Bishop of Chester, for Richmond long lay within the vast medieval Diocese of Chester before passing eventually to the modern Diocese of Leeds. The church's most prominent medieval feature is its tower, which rises to eighty feet and was built around 1399–1400 by the Earl of Westmorland — a member of the powerful Neville family who dominated the north — with the font dating from the same period.

For much of its history St Mary's shared the cure of the town with a second church. The Church of the Holy Trinity, in Richmond's great cobbled market square, was originally said to be the mother church of the parish, standing as it did within the protection of the castle walls; but as the town grew beyond the castle, the roles were reversed, and Holy Trinity became the daughter church of St Mary's, the two standing only a thousand feet apart. In the early twentieth century Holy Trinity was served by the incumbent of St Mary's, and in the 1960s it was deconsecrated and put to a new use: since the early 1970s it has housed the Green Howards Regimental Museum, telling the story of the celebrated Yorkshire infantry regiment. St Mary's remained, and remains, the active parish church.

The connection with the Green Howards runs deep at St Mary's. The walls of the church are adorned with memorials to members of the regiment who died in action or who served it with distinction, and the church has long been a place of regimental commemoration — a reminder of Richmond's role as a garrison town, with the great army camp at nearby Catterick on its doorstep. The churchyard, too, is full of history. It contains a plague pit, the mass grave of victims of one of the epidemics that periodically swept English towns; the graves of two soldiers who fought at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815; and it once housed the original building of Richmond School, one of the old grammar schools of Yorkshire. The hillside churchyard, sloping down towards the Swale, is a place where the centuries of the town's life lie layered together.

St Mary's has been much renovated over the centuries, most extensively in the nineteenth century, when, like so many medieval parish churches, it was thoroughly restored to Victorian taste — work that has left the present church considerably altered from its medieval form, though its essential medieval bones survive. The church's music is served by a fine organ: an instrument was installed in the north chapel in 1811, and was replaced in 1912 by an organ built by Harrison & Harrison, one of the foremost organ builders in Britain, later completely refurbished. The church continues to mark the great occasions of the town's life, civic and religious alike.

The setting could hardly be finer. Richmond is one of the most attractive market towns in the north of England, dominated by its magnificent eleventh-century Norman castle — among the oldest stone castles in Britain — perched above the River Swale, with the largest cobbled marketplace in the country and a Georgian theatre, the Theatre Royal of 1788, the oldest working theatre in Britain still in its original form. The town stands at the foot of Swaledale, the northernmost of the great Yorkshire Dales, and the Yorkshire Dales National Park begins just to the west. St Mary's, on its hillside above the Swale, is part of this remarkable townscape, its tower a landmark in views of the town.

From a twelfth-century Norman foundation in the patronage of St Mary's Abbey, York, through the Neville earls' tower of 1400, the Reformation and the long centuries as the senior church of a two-church parish, to its memorials of the Green Howards and its churchyard of plague victims and Waterloo veterans, St Mary's, Richmond holds nine centuries of the history of a Yorkshire town within its walls. It remains the living Anglican parish church of Richmond in the Diocese of Leeds — a Grade II* listed medieval church at the heart of one of the loveliest towns on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales.