St Patrick’s Chapel in the Lancashire Village of Heysham
A beautifully traditional Lancashire lane leads from the square at Heysham down to the coast. One begins to feel time presenting itself on either side as the delightful eighteenth & nineteenth century fishing cottages pass during the gentle walk. Such pretty & well maintained properties have to lead to something well worth visiting. The Irish sea & huge expanse of Morecambe Bay soon comes into view. The street & view are well worth the visit already, yet that is not all you have come to see.
St Peter’s Church comes in to view, framed with the wild Bay in the background. The Chancel of this Church dates back to 1340 with later additions being added in the 15th & 19th Centuries respectively. Within this Church you will find architectural history from Saxon to Viking, Norman to Victorian. A real gem. Artifacts include a Viking Hogback Stone and a medieval sepulcharl slab.
Within the Church Yard itself can be found a sundial dated 1696 as well as a scheduled monument in the guise of the base of an Anglo Saxon Cross. A worthwhile act is to pay one’s respects at the graves of eight commonwealth servicemen of World War One and three heroes of the Second World War.
Yet this wonderous site is not the primary goal of the visit, that is in fact St Patrick’s Chapel, only a few feet away on the rocky outcrop overlooking Morecambe Bay.
St Patrick’s Chapel is a wonderful little example of Anglo Saxon architecture dating back to the 8th Century. Archaeological excavations conducted in the twentieth century managed to establish that the site had in fact been in use for much longer, almost 12,000 years through to the modern day. Close to the site of the Chapel are the stone cut graves of six former Anglo Saxon residents of the small Lancashire fishing village. The bones recovered from the Heysham shoreline were dated back to the 10th Century. These curious examples of past life were even used for the art of a Black Sabbath album in the 1970’s.
A now old, yet beautiful article on the chapel described the late eighteenth century scene in the following way. :
Here you can become oblivious of the dawn of the twentieth century, can allow your mind to dwell in an unrestrained manner upon the past, the present, and the future, and what is more can enjoy a peace above all earthly dignities. Here you can go back at least a century or two, and forget that there are such realities as railway, electric lights, fashionable saloons, stores with large plated glass windows, modern gothic banks, tall factory chimneys and lugubrious workshops emitting sounds denoting the measured throbs of toil.
A description that seems just as relevant today, albeit the traits of modernity have changed somewhat. Well, at least the Internet can help such beauty be brought forth to the interested parties of today.
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