Thank you to Martin C for this photograph of the old Parwich Church which was demolished and replaced by the existing church in 1872/73.
The Old Parwich Church
Friday June 9, 2017 by Fiona H
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This is fantastic! Where did you find the photograph? Do you know why the church was replaced?
The photo was among various things in the now former Vicarage. I imagine that the old church was in bad repair -and in Victorian times benefactors were keen to rebuild churches.
Do you notice that Parwich Hill looks quite barren.
The only trees on the Hill would have been the cross shaped wood planted on the top. This was known as Grandmother Carr’s cross within the Evans/Carr/Lewis family, and was said to be planted at the instigation of the Rev Carr and his wife (a daughter of the Evans family, who owned the estate).
Gerald Lewis, who lived at Hallcliffe in the early twentieth century and set up Parwich Creamery, said (in notes for the parish magazine written in the 1950s) his grandparents planted it to mark the coronation of Queen Victoria. However, the Rev Carr was vicar here from 1822 to 1828, well before the coronation.
Caroline, the old Church, Norman in origin had become a bit of a hodge podge of styles and features. In the early nineteenth an official visitor objected to some of the windows being in a debased ‘church warden style’. The gallery on the south side of the church reached by the external staircase shown in this photo is thought to have been constructed with materials salvaged from the rood screen that would have been destroyed during the reformation, but the windows serving it look (in this photo) to be Queen Ann or Georgian. The interior of the old church also was white washed, presumably from the Reformation onwards.
A former parishioner writing in the early twentieth century recalls that a church warden, Isaac Saint who farmed from Hallcliffe, was responsible for altering the arches to the north transept. There were two rounded Romanesque arches (early Norman?) that divided the transept from the nave, but the column between them, meant most of those sitting in the transept could not be seen by the vicar from the pulpit, so could doze during sermons. Isaac Saint’s solution was to take out the column, creating a single wide flattened arch that many thought was structurally unstable, and certainly would have looked very strange.
Parwich for most of its history did not have a resident Lord of the Manor. The Levinge family came to Parwich around 1550, initially as tenants holding half the manor, but over the next hundred years bought what they rented and also various further parcels of land until they owned most of the parish and also bought the supreme lordship of the manor from the Duchy of Lancaster. They attempted to transform Parwich into a single estate, but were not resident long enough to achieve this fully. They were the only family we know of to have been buried within the old church, but moved on to grander things in Ireland in the very early seventeen hundreds and had bailiffs then tenants in Parwich.
In, I think 1815, they sold up to the Evans family, Derby manufactures and bankers who did not reside here, but used the Hall as the vicarage and giving the church living to various relatives and protégés. The Evans family were very evangelical, friends of such as William Wilberforce, and paid for the building of a number of new churches on various estates they owned in Derbyshire.
The Rev Edmund May was Vicar here from 1863 to 1870. The death of his teenage daughter, an only child, while he was vicar seemed to cause him great distress. She is buried east of the Church, though she died whilst away at school, under the large old Chestnut tree, whose roots now disturb the stones marking her grave. He also had a carved column made expressing the depth of his grief, it still stands in the Hall gardens. It is possible that this sad event triggered his move from Parwich.
The next Vicar arriving in 1870, the Rev Leighton Buckwell, was chosen not because he was a relative of the Evans family, but because he was a career clergyman from a family of successful evangelical clergymen, his father and his brothers were ordained, and held similar religious views to Sir William Evans.
Leighton Buckwell came as an energetic young man to a parish church that was seen as having little architectural merrit, was potentially structurally unsound, was not large enough to house the whole congregation and belonged to a family that had no historic or emotional connections to it. The views of those parishioners that did have an emotional attachment to their ancient place of worship did not seem to be taken into account. Looking at Alsop Church as it is now reveals what a sympathetic restoration might have achieved in Parwich. Unfortunately the enthusiasm for the new, brighter, bigger world of Victorian evangelical England purvailed here and within three years Leighton Buckwell and the Evans family chose a new church from the catalogue of a Derby builder specialising in Churches and the ancient Norman building was demolished.
However we did have the luck that a sympathetic Romanesque style was chosen, enabling the reuse of some of the Norman features from the old church, so at least it was not a complete brake from the past. By 1881 the Rev Buckwell moved on to bigger and better things.
There is an error in my account above, the north transept in the old church was divided from the nave by three arches, but the column between the two nearest the altar was removed. This would have looked very strange, with one original rounded arch remaining next to the new wide flattened arch.
Plan of the old church in Brian Foden and Andrew Robinson’s “A History of Parwich Church”.