Rivington Church

A deed of 1280 mentions three acres of "terra ecclesiastical" in Rivington. The Church land was located close to the Horwich border, named in a grant between Cecily Worsley and Adam Dorant. A Saxon font, found in the locality, is housed in the church's Millennium Room. The church has a circular graveyard which is typical of churches of early foundation. That, and the Saxon font, may be proof of pre-Conquest foundation. The arched windows on the south side are cut from solid stone, a Saxon feature. At the enclosure of the manorial waste in 1536, the priest was given 30 acre.Richard Pilkington, whose son became the Bishop of Durham, appealed to Doctor Bird, the Bishop of Chester, to dedicate…

The roof has four collar trusses with bracing to tie-beams and collars. The church is furnished with a late-medieval oak screen and a late 16th-century octagonal, oak pulpit on a stem with two linen-fold panels in each side. On the north wall is a genealogical painting copied, in 1835, from a 16th-century painting relating to the Pilkington family which was damaged by fire in 1834. There is an 18th-century brass chandelier with fluted body and two tiers of arms.