Old St Mary's Church, Tarleton

St Mary’s Old Church near to the village of Tarleton in western Lancashire sits by the A59, the lengthy highway with which the folk at Salem Chapel are not unfamiliar. So close to the road it is, and so busy the lanes, that it is not easy to approach, and even warrants its own, dedicated traffic light to allow visitors out on to the busy junction. Early Georgian, it was built back in 1719. It closed in 1886 when Tarleton built a more commodious (and more boring) parish church in the village’s centre. Old St Mary’s is occasionally used for a service, but is otherwise locked up, my internal photographs taken through the windows and even the key hole (below). Despite its location next to a major arterial road with commuters and holidaymakers destined for Southport, Preston and Liverpool, Old St Mary’s struck me as a rather lonely, if not very quiet, place.

Curiously, a Father George Dandy had founded for his soul a chantry chapel on this spot back in 1525. In its grounds was also a hermitage, where lived, in succession, at least three hermits: James Piper, Robert Halworth and Hugh Dobson, until the chantry and hermitage were closed down at the time of the great Reformation. Tarleton had no place of worship until the time of Cromwell, when a Presbyterian meeting house was erected, at some other location.

Perhaps it has regularly become, and then unbecome, a lonely place: first a modest chantry, and a hermitage; then it was demolished by a greedy landlord, and rebuilt as a parish church. Now it is a people-less structure of only momentary interest to drivers as they sit idly at the lights, impatiently awaiting a change of colour. Thousands must pass it every hour, and hundreds of thousands live within a few miles, but here is a church in which no-one congregates. It sits among the masses, but keeps no company. There it stands, tight lipped, neither lending nor borrowing.

It is possible to be lonely in a crowd, in a family, in a marriage. It is not uncommon to be part of a big church congregation, and yet neither know, nor be known. There are people living in the most populated of cities who might as well be in the Sahara or outer space judging by the wideness of their social lives. Whatever family and friendships we have or don’t have, the God of Old St Mary’s still reigns, and still delights to receive the lonely, the broken, the orphan, the widow, the friendless. Those deemed unworthy of company by people are deemed worthy of heaven by God, if through Christ they will come to Him.