England & Wales Hardwicke Marriage Index
Marriages 1754 - 1837
Whitworth Parish Church

The Parish

The chapelry of Whitworth, its mother parish being Merrington, lies in the southern portion of central County Durham roughly 4 miles northeast of the market town of Bishop Auckland. Whitworth sits a little over 2 miles north of the A688 road which connects Bishop Auckland through to the A1M, the Great North Road. Whitworth is a tiny place with most of the chapelries acreage taken up with the estate of the former Whitworth Hall, its claim to fame being the home of the "Bonny Bobby Shafto" of song lyrical fame. Today that former estate is a country park and the hall a hotel. The principal settlement is the village of Byers Green which has an inverted "L" shape plan and lies just under a mile west, around the church there are estate buildings and otherwise the area is one of scattered farms and cottages. Like most estate villages Whitworth's economy would have been driven by the needs of the estate with pastoral farming the main driver. Whitworth is drained northeastwards by the nearby River Wear which after passing through Durham reaches the North Sea through the port of Sunderland. Whitworth is sited at 100 metres above the sea, some 50 metres above the incised Wear, to its south and beyond the industrial town of Spennymoor some heights reach almost 200 metres. Although merely a chapelry, with many marriages taking place at the mother parish of Merrington, some 3,200 acres are assigned to Whitworth chapelry which supported a population of around 200 parishioners. Like most of northern England north of the Tees Whitworth is not mentioned in Domesday Book which did not cover this area.

The Church

Whitworth parish church, there is no known dedication, lies within the estate, now country park, of the former Hall to the west of the hall itself. Whilst there was a medieval church here the present one is a combination of a replacement of 1803 much modified, Pevsner terms it remodelled, in 1850 so only the venue for a few of these marriages. The church is a simple one without aisles and built in a faux-Early English Gothic style fashionable in the early 19th century The remodelling was quite extensive and saw the lowering of the height of the nave, the chancel, vestry and southern porch added so almost amounted to a complete rebuild. A few 20th century works completed the building. The church should be accessed from the hotel's car park by heading east from the same. The churchyard is small and surrounded by trees but of sufficient size to allow unfettered views.