The Roman Catholic Church of St Mary, Osbaldeston in the County of -- Lancashire --

	St Mary Church Sign

	The Church of St Mary from the Front

In 1832 St Mary’s Church Osbaldeston was established as a separate parish and in 1834 Fr. William Carter, the priest at Samlesbury started a Sunday School here and began to celebrate Mass on a more or less regular basis – on Sundays or Mondays. In 1836 Fr. George Corless became the first resident Parish Priest. It would seem that he was subjected to some petty attacks and annoyances on the part of bigoted neighbours and he left in 1840.

	The Church of St Mary from the Graveyard

In the meantime, in 1834 Captain William Heatley of Brindle Lodge, near Preston, had purchased Clover Field and Clover Croft part of Lower Abbot Farm and donated the land for Fr Carter to build a Church and house. He also donated 19 acres of farm land – Higher Commons Farm – as an endowment.

With his generous help, and that of the Hubbersty family, the present St Mary’s Church and Presbytery were built, and the Church was opened on 25th October, 1838. The Church itself is one of the first free standing Catholic Churches to be built after the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1825 which eased many of the restrictions of the Penal Laws. Since the Catholic church-building tradition had been lost at the Reformation, St Mary’s was built in the simple form of a Dissenters’ Chapel – oblong and pillar-less. It is built of mill-stone grit, quarried at Butler’s Delph on the Yellow Hills near Blackburn.

This information was obtained from the Notice Boards in the Church of St Mary.

	The Inside of St Mary