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Church of St Thomas

Two Churches in one Churchyard

It is most unusual to find two churches remaining in a single yard (the only other examples in England are at Westminster and South Walsham in Norfolk), but that is what we find in the ancient hilltop village of Heptonstall.

Beside the 19th-century church of St Thomas, built in the 1850s at a cost of £6666, stand the ruins of the original church of St Thomas a Becket, first built c.1260.

The old church suffered severe storm damage in September 1847, losing its roof and part of the walls, including the tower. The villagers, rather than rebuild the already much-altered edifice (described by John Wesley in 1786 as ‘the ugliest [church] I know’), decided to construct a proud new Victorian Gothic church in keeping with their age. The old church’s clock (made in Sowerby Bridge in 1810) was re-installed in the new church.

The old church had a colourful history. Most spectacularly, the church was closed as a result of ‘an effusion of blood’ in 1482 - the precise historical details of the incident that precipitated this are unknown, but a local legend, ironically in a church dedicated to St Thomas a Becket, tells of a priest slain in the church for performing an illicit marriage. A remnant of bygone folk magic came to light in 1847, when a mummified cat was found in the ruins of the tower - cats were once walled up alive to protect a building from fire, though apparently not storm.

The new church has had its controversies too, particularly over the new moveable internal furniture installed in the 1960s, which was not to more traditionalist tastes.

Among the noteworthy gravestones in the old churchyard (said to have contained over 100,000 bodies) is that of David Hartley, leader of a notorious gang of coin counterfeiters at the close of the 18th century, who was hanged at York in 1770 and was suspended in chains on top of Beacon Hill in Halifax.

The new churchyard is especially known and visited for the grave of Sylvia Plath (d.1963), the American poet who married Mytholmroyd-born Ted Hughes, who later became Poet Laureate.

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