St Helen's Church, Churchtown

St Helen's Church in the village of Churchtown, Lancashire, is one of the finest medieval churches in the county — so grand and so handsome that it has long been known as the "Cathedral of the Fylde". Standing close to the banks of the River Wyre, it was historically the parish church of Garstang, and its size and dignity reflect the importance of that ancient parish. A Grade I listed building, the highest grade, reserved for buildings of exceptional and sometimes international importance, St Helen's is a magnificent Perpendicular Gothic church whose history stretches back some eight centuries, and it remains the proud parish church of Churchtown today.

The village of Churchtown, once known as Kirkland, was historically the heart of the large ecclesiastical parish of Garstang, with St Helen's as its mother church. The oldest parts of the present building date from the thirteenth century — the piers and responds in the chancel, and the arch piers in the nave — though the church was largely rebuilt in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the soaring Perpendicular style of the late Middle Ages. Its closeness to the River Wyre, which gives the setting much of its beauty, has also been a source of danger: in 1736 the river overflowed and flooded the churchyard, damaging the church and necessitating its restoration. In 1811 the roofs were replaced, the walls raised and a clerestory added to bring more light into the nave, and a further restoration was carried out between 1866 and 1869 by the eminent Lancaster architect E. G. Paley, at a cost of £1,372. The church was designated a Grade I listed building on 17 April 1967.

Architecturally, St Helen's is a fine and complete example of the Perpendicular style, built of rubble stone with dressed ashlar detailing, and roofed with low-pitched roofs behind plain parapets. Its plan consists of a clerestoried nave with aisles to the north and south, a chapel and porch on the south side, a west tower, and a chancel that itself has north and south aisles and a north vestry — a generous and spacious arrangement that helps to explain the church's cathedral-like reputation. The west tower rises through six stages, with angled buttresses, a crenellated parapet, and a small turret crowned by a spire at its north-east corner; its belfry has trefoiled two-light openings, and a clock is set into the north wall. Inside, the tower measures eleven feet square and opens into the nave through a finely moulded arch, while the nave itself, some fifty-five feet long, is separated from its aisles by elegant five-bay arcades of pointed arches carried on round piers.

The church is rich in monuments and history. In the nave lies a recumbent effigy commemorating Alexander Butler, who died in 1726, and to the south of the south aisle is the Lady Chapel, one of the church's most precious features. It was founded by Margaret Rigmaiden of Wedacre, who died in 1516, and endowed by the Rigmayden family in 1529 — a chantry chapel where prayers were to be said for the souls of its benefactors. The chapel is entered through two pointed arches and contains a piscina with a cusped head, used for washing the sacred vessels at Mass, and on its wall an inscription in Latin survives, a poignant relic of the medieval devotion that the chapel was built to serve. Together these features give St Helen's a wealth of interest that fully justifies its grand nickname.

For centuries St Helen's has stood at the centre of the religious life of the Garstang district, and it continues today as an active church of the Church of England in the Diocese of Blackburn, within the Province of York and the deanery of Garstang. As the town of Garstang has grown and been divided into more than one ecclesiastical parish, the church's parish is now formally known as Garstang St Helen (Churchtown), and it shares a benefice with St Michael's Church at St Michael's on Wyre nearby. Through all these changes it has remained the historic mother church of the area, its tall tower a landmark above the Wyre valley.

St Helen's stands in the small and attractive village of Churchtown, just north of the market town of Garstang in rural Lancashire, in the gentle country between the Forest of Bowland and the coastal plain of the Fylde. Garstang itself — famous as the world's first "Fairtrade Town" — lies a short distance to the south, with its old market place, the Lancaster Canal and the ruins of Greenhalgh Castle; the rivers Wyre and the surrounding farmland, the hills of the Forest of Bowland Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty to the east, and the Fylde coast at Blackpool and Fleetwood to the west are all within easy reach.

From a thirteenth-century church rebuilt in the great age of Perpendicular Gothic, through the flood of 1736 and the Georgian and Victorian restorations that followed, the medieval Lady Chapel of the Rigmaidens and the effigy of Alexander Butler, St Helen's Church gathers some eight centuries of Lancashire history into one magnificent building beside the Wyre. A Grade I listed church known and loved as the "Cathedral of the Fylde", it remains the living parish church of Churchtown and Garstang — a monument to the faith and the wealth of medieval Lancashire, and one of the finest churches in the county.