Christmas Post: Christmas Tree Festival at Chesterfield Parish Church

I recently decided to take a trip out to Chesterfield in Derbyshire to visit the Christmas Tree Festival at Chesterfield Parish Church, often also known as the Crooked Spire Church, for obvious reasons. I’ve never actually been to the town before even though it’s a direct 35 minute train ride from Nottingham but I’m very glad I made the trip. I’ll get on to the history of the church later, but firstly the Festival. It finished on the 30th of November and was free but there were donation buckets dotted around (I donated some money but also bought a few things in the gift shop).

The festival is now in its 10th year but I’d only heard about it recently by chance (checking out something else on the Visit Peak District website). There were over 100 Christmas trees decorated in some quite imaginative ways from local school children, businesses and organisations such as the Post Office, East Midlands Railway and Guide Dogs for the Blind. A small selection of my favourites follows:

And so onto the church itself. It’s full name is the Parish Church of St Mary and All Saints. It’s the largest church in the area and easy to navigate to just by looking for the spire. The present church is mostly 14th century with lots of renovations in the intervening years. The Spire which is 228ft from the ground and has a 9ft 6″ lean to the southwest probably dates from 1360. It contains 150 tons of oak which they think came from Sherwood Forest. The prevailing theory is that the twist was an intentional design feature but that the lean is accidental; 50 tons of lead was added to the spire in 1639 which is thought to account for it.

There are some fun speculations on why the spire was crooked though which over the years have included the incense from the mass making the devil sneeze and thereby lashing his tail around the spire to stop himself from falling and causing it to lean or the church’s spire being so surprised to find a virgin marrying in the church that it twisted around in shock to have a look at her!

One other thing I was very impressed with was the stained glass windows. This one for example called the Anniversary Window was given to the church by the people of the town in 1984 and traces the history of the town from its beginnings as a Norman village to the present day.

The St Francis Window also looks lovely with him surrounded by animals; it was installed in 1994.

There’s also a very large organ which was built in 1905 by T C Lewis for Glasgow City Hall originally as a sister organ to the one I saw in action in Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery. It was moved to this church in 1963 to replace the original organ – that had been largely destroyed in a fire that nearly took out the entire church. The cause of that fire? An electrical fault with the old organ.

It was a lovely event held in a very nice building.