Our Blessed Lady Immaculate

Introduction

Our Blessed Lady Immaculate in Blackhill, within the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle, is a Grade II listed church, first listed on 21-Jan-1987. The parish is part of a partnership of ten Catholic parishes in the Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle. Adults becoming members of the Church follow the RCIA programme, receiving their first Holy Communion during the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night.

Architecture and furnishings

The church was built in 1854-7 by A. Dunn, with a spire added in 1872. The church is built of coursed squared sandstone with ashlar dressings and a Welsh slate roof. The church has an aisled nave with a ritual south-west porch and a south-east tower in the south aisle. The church is in the Early English style.

The interior has a painted plaster over boarded dado and painted ashlar dressings. The nave roof is arch-braced scissor-truss with side struts on moulded corbels. The east nave wall is covered in painted canvas with a Gothic-lettered border to the chancel arch. The church has a Gothic-style wood reredos and late C19/early C20 traceried altar, communion rail and pulpit.

The porch contains a wall stoup under a cusped arch and a painted cast-iron Gothic-style pillar stoup. The 3-stage tower has triple south lancets and a plate-tracery 2-light east window in the first stage, under relieving arches. The tower's set-back third stage has paired bell openings under cinquefoils in panels with foliage-carved cornices. The tower's parapet has corner and centre gargoyles at the string course, and the pyramidal slate roof has large lucarnes and a wrought iron cross finial.

A tall stone spire with small lucarnes and a cross finial crowns the church. Gabled buttresses support the aisles, angle buttresses the tower, and tall coped buttresses the west front. The west front has double boarded doors in a shafted cusped arch with a moulded 2-centred-arched surround, three tall lancets above, and a trefoiled roundel in the gable peak. The south-west door sits in a 2-centred chamfered arch under a gable with a statue in a niche.

Lancet windows are paired in the aisles, tall in each of the three sides of the east apse, and paired in the south wall of the lower chancel. The clerestory has five cinquefoil lights. Steeply-pitched roofs with cross finials cover the church. Below the tower's second stage, a string has a statue in a niche under a clock on the south, and tall slender paired lancets on the east.

The church has 4-bay north and 5-bay south arcades with high 2-centred chamfered arches to the porch, chapel and continuation of the north arcade under the west organ gallery on wood brackets. Chamfered square pew ends carry oval enamel number plaques.