Any visitor to Poulton should spend a few minutes looking inside St Chad’s. It is a beautiful, peaceful place, that remains a true village church.
St Chad’s is an easy 15-mins minutes walk from Highcross Corner. If travelling by car, park in the Teanlowe (Booth’s) car park, a couple of minutes walk away.
Sunday services are at 8am and 10am and use the Common Worship liturgy, There is sadly no choir, but there is an organist, and the congregation sing the hymns with enthusiasm.
Poulton-le-Fylde seems to have been built around St Chad’s Church. It is impossible to enter Poulton and not see the beautiful church of St Chad, and its striking weather vane in the form of a ship. The church stands above the Market Square and dominates the town, so that the visitor seems to spend his time walking in circles around it. The bells can be heard throughout the town, on the evenings when the bell-ringers practise, and of course before services. In spring, the graveyard is covered with a carpet of crocuses.
It is strange to discover, therefore, that the church we see today is not ancient. It was built in 1751 in the Georgian style, using some of the old walls, which have survived under the plaster.
A bit of Poulton history
There has been a church in Poulton since at least 1094. We know this because it was in that year that Roger, Count of Poitou, gave “in Agmundernes, Pulton (Poulton in the Amounderness Hundred)… and the church” to the Abbey of St Martin in Normandy. It is at least possible that the church predates the Domesday Book of 1086, although it is not listed there (many churches are not).
Poulton remained, for many years after the establishment of the English Church, a stronghold of Catholicism. Even after St Chad’s became Anglican, the nearby chapel at Singleton remained Catholic. Many of the large houses in the area were Catholic safe-houses – among them Rossall Grange (the site, nearly, of the present Rossall School) and Mains Hall (now the River Barn, which has been shamefully rebuilt as a tasteless wedding venue, pretty much destroying the ancient Hall).
Poulton has often been slow to adopt new ways and abandon old ones. As the main market town for the region, Poulton was a centre for justice and punishment. The old stocks and whipping-post still stand in the Market Square. Almost unbelievably, as late as 1837 there were people alive who remembered the ducking stool at the pool at the bottom of the Breck, towards Skippool Creek, which was used for the punishment of women.
