St Edmund, Edmundbyers

St Edmund’s is a Grade II parish church off the B6278 on the western edge of Edmundbyers, County Durham, in the Diocese of Durham.

Overview

Historic England lists a parish church of the twelfth century and later, restored about 1859, in sandstone rubble with ashlar dressings and a stone-flagged roof. The plan is a four-bay nave with south porch and a three-bay chancel with north organ chamber and vestry. The porch has a chamfered round-headed doorway; nave windows are nineteenth-century and round-headed, with drip moulds. The slightly lower chancel retains narrow chamfered medieval round-headed lights as well as nineteenth-century windows; a west gabled bellcote crowns the nave. The listing notes a restored chancel arch flanked by inserted lower round-headed arches used as lectern and pulpit, a west vestry of twentieth-century construction using reused seventeenth-century and later elements (including a door from Shepherds Dene, Riding Mill, and a priest’s pew from Auckland Castle), and a memorial to William Featherstonhaugh, rector 1856–1904. Local accounts place the church around 1100–1150, possibly on an earlier site, and record a stone altar hidden in 1571 and later reinstated.

Further Information

• Historic England list entry 1229331
• British Listed Buildings: Church of St Edmund