Lottery cash for church

Mar 19 2008 by Clive Bond, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

LOTTERY cash will be used to improve a church’s crumbling fabric.

St Mary’s in the centre of Elland is to get £36,000.

It will pay for repairs to north and south aisle and north-east chapel roofs, masonry and drainage.

Grade I listed St Mary’s dates from 1180 and was most probably built by the masons who a decade earlier had completed Kirkstall Abbey in Leeds.

Extensive alterations were carried out during the 15th century, when the tower was built.

Some £1.6m of lottery money will be used to repair St Mary’s and some of Yorkshire’s other historic places of worship.

English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund offered the support for urgent repairs to 17 listed churches in Yorkshire and Humberside as part of national grants worth £15m targeting 160 churches.

Some date back to Anglo-Saxon times.

Humberside is to get £650,000, West Yorkshire £260,000, South Yorkshire £253,000 and North Yorkshire £500,000.