St Mary's Church, Kirkby Lonsdale

St Mary's Church stands at the heart of Kirkby Lonsdale, the handsome stone market town in the Lune valley of Cumbria, a few steps from the famous viewpoint over the river that Ruskin praised and Turner painted. A Grade I listed building containing some of the finest Norman architecture in the north-west, it is an active Anglican parish church in the Diocese of Carlisle, its benefice united with six local churches in the Kirkby Lonsdale Team Ministry.

The oldest parts of the church are Norman, and remarkable ones: three doorways and the inner north arcade date from the early twelfth century, with the base of the tower and the south arcade from later in that century. The west part of the arcade between nave and inner north aisle is the church's glory — early Norman round arches on piers bearing incised decoration similar to that on the mighty piers of Durham Cathedral, a connection that links this Lune valley church to the greatest Romanesque building in England. The south arcade is later and simpler, the eastern arches of both arcades pointed, and the easternmost pier of the south arcade contains a piscina.

The church grew sideways through the centuries. In the fourteenth century, or about 1400, the north and south walls were demolished and rebuilt further out — the new south wall incorporating the earlier Norman south doorway — and a chantry chapel was added to the north-east in 1486. The sixteenth century brought a new clerestory, pinnacles and battlements, and in 1574 a second aisle was built north of the existing north aisle, giving the church its unusually wide rectangular plan, with the west tower embraced by the aisles. The tower top was rebuilt in 1705, when the chantry chapel was demolished; in 1807 Francis Webster removed the clerestory, battlements and pinnacles and threw an overall roof across the whole. The Victorian restoration of 1866 was by E. G. Paley of Lancaster, who raised the roof, gave the outer north aisle its own roof, reseated the church, re-floored the chancel, added the Neo-Norman south porch, and installed a screen and font. The four-stage tower carries embattled parapets, Perpendicular upper stages — and a clock so oddly placed that it famously wrecks the tower's symmetry, presumed a nineteenth-century addition.

The furnishings span the centuries: a pulpit dated 1619 (since reduced in size); a font brought from a fourteenth-century chapel at Killington, set on a Victorian base; an alabaster reredos with mosaic decoration; and a fifteenth-century tomb chest with alabaster effigy as the oldest monument. The stained glass is mostly by Lavers, Barraud and Westlake, with windows by Heaton, Butler and Bayne to designs by Henry Holiday, by Shrigley and Hunt, and by William Wailes. The two-manual organ, built in the 1860s by Forster and Andrews, was rebuilt and enlarged by Jardine in 1925 and extensively rebuilt by Laycock and Bannister in 1972, and the tower holds a ring of six bells, all cast in 1825 by Thomas Mears II of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

The churchyard — from whose north-eastern corner the path leads to Ruskin's View — contains ten separately Grade II listed monuments: eighteenth-century table tombs and memorials to the Burrow, Preston, Newby, Turner and other town families, John Dent's monument of 1709, and a touching memorial west of the church to five women who died in a fire at the Rose and Crown Inn in 1820. North of the church stands a curiosity: a two-storey octagonal stone gazebo, formerly in the vicarage garden, with round-headed doors and windows but its roof long lost. With Durham-patterned piers, a lopsided clock and one of the loveliest settings of any town church in England, St Mary's remains the mother church of the Lune valley — serving its team of parishes as it has served Kirkby Lonsdale for nine hundred years.