St. Peter's Church in Woolley

 

A view of St. Peter's church from the south-east

Starting my day out to Woolley by alighting from the No. 59 bus at the Barnsley Road/George Lane stop at approximately 11:54 am, after photographing 19 listed buildings and other structures as part of a British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge, it took me exactly an hour to walk to the Grade I Listed St. Peter’s church.

 

The tower

 

Having looked online and found that its Google Map listing showed that it would be open, in the absence of such information on the church or related websites, I was very disappointed to discover that it was actually closed.

 

The interior of the porch

Looking at the notices in the porch, I had hoped to find details of a keyholder but found no information there and, having seen a window open and a car parked outside, I went to the vicarage next door where, much to my great surprise, I was greeted by the Bishop of Beverley.

 

Woolley Edge Rock in the porch

Having explained that I had made a special effort to visit the church, which involved travel by two buses a train, I thought that he might have tried calling Reverend Kevin Greaves, who doesn’t actually live in the village, to ask for the whereabouts of a key, but he didn’t seem at all interested and so I just returned to the church to have another look at the interior of the porch.

The south door

 

During previous visits to Wakefield Cathedral and the Chantry Chapel of St. Mary in Wakefield and St. Helen’s church and Sandal Castle in Sandal Magna, I noticed that the coarse grained sandstone had a very distinctive striped appearance, caused by differentially weathered iron rich beds with a purplish colour.

A detail of the surround to the south door

 

In this area, the geological memoir for Wakefield (1940) records that the Woolley Edge Rock was a very important building stone in the region, with a reference to its use for the restoration of the cathedral. As a 'geological detective', I have had to deduce that it was sandstone from this rock formation that I had seen in these buildings – based on my own observations of its physical characteristics, compared to very many others that I had by now seen on my travels.

 

A detail of striping in the Woolley Edge Rock

Having had a good look at the Woolley Edge Rock in the porch, I had a quick walk around the exterior of the church. Pevsner’s description of the exterior is limited to “Perp throughout” and Peter Ryder, in Medieval Churches of West Yorkshire, says that the only architectural features to survive from earlier periods are all reset in later walls. The rest is the result of the late C15 and early C16 remodelling, carried out in various phases and a restoration c.1870 by Ewan Christian.

 

A detail of the south wall of the porch

The masonry to the outer south face of the porch displays thin planar beds and more massive sandstone with cross-bedding, which are both deeply scoured in places and, as seen elsewhere in the Woolley Edge Rock, the thin iron rich beds are differentially weathered.

 

Millennium sculptures by Charles Gurrey

 

I was very surprised to see two interesting pieces of modern sculpture designed by Charles Gurrey on the porch, one an upside down cross and the other a relief sculpture set into a niche, which depicts three fish. Part of a Millennium project in 2000, these are both symbols of Saint Peter, who was crucified upside down and known as the fisher of men.

 

A crocketted pinnacle on the chancel

 
For a C15 church, typically flamboyant Perpendicular Gothic style elements are few and far between, with a castellated parapet, crocketted pinnacles and modest gargoyles to the tower. On the east wall of the chancel, quite unusually, there is a pair of crocketted pinnacles that have a very large diameter compared to their height.

Views of the south and north elevations

 

Without getting close to the masonry, I took a set of general record photographs of the south and north elevations, but I did notice that a section of walling below the chancel window that has been restored using precisely squared blocks with a tooled finish. Although lacking the yellow/orange colouration of the original stonework, these show thin purplish stripes, which is similar to that seen in the historic buildings mentioned above.

Restored masonry in the east wall of the chancel