Emmanuel Church Holcombe

The parish church of Holcombe, standing high on the flank of Holcombe Hill below the Peel Tower. There has been Christian worship on or near this site since the Middle Ages.

Chapels of ease

Emmanuel succeeded a line of earlier chapels of ease going back at least to about 1400, on a site where a Christian presence is recorded from the early fourteenth century. An earlier chantry chapel here was closed for a century following the Reformation.

The present church

The church was consecrated on 13 April 1853. It was designed in a neo-Gothic manner by Thomas Holt of Bury and cost £2,226 to build, of which a local benefactor, Mrs Sandiford, gave £500. Holcombe did not formally become a parish in its own right until 1866.

The building is of cut and quarry-faced rubble with ashlar dressings, and consists of a chancel, a tall nave with lean-to aisles, and a west tower with angle buttresses, a two-light window in the narrower upper stage, and a broach spire with lucarnes. It was listed Grade II on 29 January 1985.

Sources: Holcombe Village Society; British Listed Buildings.