St Luke's Church, Farnworth

St Luke's Church, Farnworth, stands in what was once a separate Lancashire village and is now part of the town of Widnes in Cheshire — a Grade II* listed church of twelfth-century origin, an active Anglican parish church in the diocese of Liverpool, and home to a collection of family monuments considered "one of the best in the county," gathered around a family whose very name, legend says, was won by killing a griffin.

Farnworth is an ancient village about two miles north of the River Mersey, now subsumed into Widnes in the borough of Halton. Around 1180 a chapel dedicated to St Wilfrid was built here, when the place was known as St Wilfrids-on-the-Hill — a chapel of ease to the mother church at Prescot, with the townships of Bold, Appleton, Cronton, Cuerdley, Ditton and Penketh within its boundaries. Originally in the Mercian diocese of Lichfield, the church passed to the new diocese of Chester after 1541, when the abbey at Chester became a cathedral; it was re-dedicated to St Luke in 1859, became a separate parish that year, and joined the new diocese of Liverpool in 1880. One of its earliest benefactors was Yorfrid, the first — and in its own right the only — Baron of Widnes, whose barony passed to the Barons of Halton when his daughter married William FitzNigel; but over the centuries the great patrons were the Bold family of the neighbouring township of Bold.

The Bolds carry the church's best story. The legend of the griffin tells how the beast was terrorising the people and animals of the district until the village blacksmith was persuaded to fight it; after a prolonged battle he slew the griffin, was acclaimed a hero, and was given the name "The Bold" — the origin, so the story goes, of the family name, and the reason a griffin appears on all the family's heraldic decorations.

The building grew steadily through the Middle Ages: the north aisle was added about 1280–1300; the south aisle between 1360 and 1380, around the time the tower was built; the Bold Chantry in 1406; the east end extended in 1431. The Cuerdley chapel, added to the south of the church in 1500, has a grimly practical history — it was provided by Bishop William Smyth so that his tenants in the village of Cuerdley could attend mass without coming into contact with the people of Farnworth, at a time when plague was prevalent in the area: social distancing, Tudor style. A major restoration of 1855 by William Culshaw rebuilt the nave, north aisle and Bold Chapel, restored the chancel's east end, re-roofed the nave and added galleries, with the organ moved to the west gallery. The last great internal restoration came in 1894–95 from the Lancaster architects Paley, Austin and Paley, at a cost of £4,011: the galleries were removed, plaster stripped from the walls, two new vestries erected north of the chancel, and a new organ installed.

The church is built of red sandstone under a slate roof: a west tower with corner buttresses and a curvilinear west window, a five-bay nave with clerestory of pitched dormers, north and south aisles — the north almost entirely occupied by the Bold chapel — a south transept, north and south porches, and a narrower, lower chancel with crocketted finials; tower, chancel and transept are all crenellated. Inside, the octagonal font of local sandstone has been dated to around 1280. The altar is made from wood taken from the rood screen pulled down at the Reformation; the screen under the tower arch is seventeenth-century, and a pew behind the pulpit is dated 1607. Seven hatchments of the Bold family, dating from 1762 to 1840, hang on the nave walls. The stained glass includes a Morris & Co. window of 1876 in the north aisle depicting the fiery furnace from the book of Daniel, an east window of 1891 by Burlison and Grylls, and glass by Shrigley and Hunt in the west window and the transept. In the chancel are memorials to John and Edward Atherton by T. Franceys and Spence of Liverpool, and on the south wall a pink marble tablet to the scientist Ferdinand Hurter, who died in 1898 — the pioneer, with Vero Driffield, of photographic sensitometry, and chief chemist of the alkali works that made Widnes a chemical town.

The Bold chapel is the showpiece. Its communion table is early seventeenth-century; a sham bookcase was formerly a concealed door of about 1810 from the library of Bold Hall. The monuments begin with a crude effigy of a knight, probably Richard Bold, from around 1602, and continue through memorials to Richard Bold (died 1635) and his wife; Richard Bold (died 1704), a cartouche with cherubs; Peter Bold (died 1762) by B. Bromfield of Liverpool; and Anna Maria Bold (died 1813) by G. Bullock. The memorial to Peter Patten Bold, dated 1822, is signed by Francis Chantrey — the leading sculptor of Regency England — in white marble, depicting a woman kneeling over a pedestal. Most touching is the memorial to Mary, Princess Sapieha (1795–1824), the Bold heiress who married a Polish prince and died of tuberculosis only two years later; it was made in Rome by Pietro Tenerani. Behind the altar is a white effigy of 1852 to Alice Houghton. The organ, built by Peter Conacher and restored by Reeves in 1986, accompanies a ring of six bells cast in 1956 by John Taylor and Company.

The churchyard keeps its own curiosities: a sundial originally from the garden of Bold Hall, given to the church after the New Hall's demolition in 1899; a nine-foot column that is part of an old churchyard cross; and in the south-east corner a former bridewell — a village lock-up — of 1827, sandstone under slate, separately listed Grade II. From St Wilfrid's-on-the-Hill to the chemical age of Hurter, by way of plague chapels, a Chantrey marble and a blacksmith's griffin, St Luke's compresses eight centuries of south Lancashire history into one red sandstone church.