The Catholic churches of Dorset

Dorset is an ancient, mainly rural county of great beauty, in the south of England, surrounded by Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. It is historically divided into the three parts of Deserta, Felix and Petraea. The English Channel provides the southern boundary. The spirit of Thomas Hardy haunts the county.

John Betjeman loved the euphony of the names of the various Dorset villages: "Rime Intrinsica, Fontmell Magna, Sturminster Newton and Melbury Bubb … Lord's Day bells from Bingham's Melcombe, Iwerne Minster, Shroton, Plush."

St Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury, was made Bishop of Sherborne in 705. The diocese of Sherborne then consisted of Dorset, Somerset, Devon, part of Wiltshire and, from the end of the 9th century, Cornwall. In 909, new sees of Crediton (Devon and Cornwall), Wells (Somerset) and Ramsbury (Berkshire and Wiltshire) were created, leaving Sherborne with Dorset. In 1075, the Council of London allocated Wiltshire, Berkshire and Dorset to the See of Sarum. In 1220, the new Cathedral of Salisbury was built.

In 1850, Catholic Dorset was made part of the Diocese of Plymouth. It was well endowed with religious houses up to the Reformation: Abbotsbury (Benedictine, founded 1044), Bindon (Cistercian, founded 1172), Cerne (Benedictine, founded 987), Forde (Cistercian, founded c1137), Fryer Mayne (Hospitaller, founded before 1275), Milton (Benedictine, founded 964), Shaftesbury (Benedictine nuns, founded c888), and Sherborne (Benedictine, founded before 672). The abbey churches of Milton and Sherborne have survived relatively intact in Anglican hands.

There was some recusancy in Dorset in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. The Catholic Arundells of Lanherne had inherited Chideock on the death of John de Chidiocke in 1450. Chideock provided seven Catholic martyrs between 1596 and 1642, three of them priests, chaplains to the Arundell family. The 7th Lord Arundell of Wardour inherited the estate from his Cornish cousins in 1738. It was sold to the Welds of Lulworth in 1802.

The Welds were descended from Sir Humphrey Weld, Lord Mayor of London. They purchased Lulworth Castle and its estate from Viscount Howard of Bindon in 1641. The Welds became Catholic thereafter, Sir John Weld (obit. 1674) marrying a Stourton, and remained so. The 12,000-acre estate remains in their hands.

St Mary's Chapel, Lulworth was built for Thomas Weld (1750-1819) in 1786-7 by the architect John Tasker at a cost of £2,380. The chapel was the first free-standing Catholic place of worship built since the Reformation and was, in theory, illegal as such at the time of construction. Thomas Weld was a friend of George III who frequently stayed at nearby Weymouth and the King sanctioned the building provided that from the outside "it looked like a mausoleum". The chapel is a rotunda in form and in fact looks like a very large garden temple. To the (ritual) west the entrance is a simple porch of Tuscan columns. To the east there is a proper three-bay façade with a Tuscan porch. The stone came from Portland. The builders were the Bastard brothers of Blandford.

The interior is described by Pevsner as "wonderfully serene" with four apses, three with galleries on Tuscan columns, the fourth with the altar space. The magnificent altar is of 1770 and was originally intended for the English College in Bruges. The organ of 1785 was made by Richard Seede of Bristol.

In 1865 Edward Weld employed Joseph Hansom to redo the interior decoration in a Byzantine style. In 1951 the architect H.S. Goodhart-Rendel restored the interior of the chapel to its original Georgian form.

The Catholic Emancipation Act was passed in 1829. This allowed Catholics proper freedom in building churches even to the extent of having towers and spires, hitherto disallowed. Three extant Dorset Catholic churches were built in the decade after Emancipation.

The first of these was Our Lady, Marnhull. A mission had been set up under the aegis of the convert Hussey family in 1725. The present church was opened by Father William Casey in 1832. It is a simple rural building made primarily coursed, squared rubble. It possesses lancet windows. There are some good furnishings including various statues of saints. The Gothic reredos has painted pictures of saints. The blueish medieval glass at the east end is by Antoine Lusson of Paris.

St Augustine of Canterbury, Dorchester Road, Weymouth was opened in 1835 as a plain Georgian chapel. The façade was rebuilt in 1909 when the present Quattrocento-ish façade with statue of St Augustine was added. The Bishop of Plymouth reported that "At Weymouth means have been found to give a more seemly front to the Church of St Augustine's. An elegant one of purely Italian architecture has been substituted." At the same time a new sanctuary was added.

St Michael and St George, Lyme Regis was built in 1835-37 to the design of the Anglican architect Henry Goodridge of Bath. The Lady Chapel is later (1851). Externally the church is rendered with stone dressings. Internally the church has ribbed vaulting, The altar is by G. Goldie, and the east window of 1885 by Westlake, Lavers & Co.

The Chideock estate was purchased in 1802 by Thomas Weld of Lulworth for his sixth son, Humphrey, who built the manor house. His son Charles built the delightful Church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs and St Ignatius, Chideock to his own design in 18702 in an early Christian/Byzantine style. The façade has a low narthex; above, the west gable has a large terracotta roundel painted with Our Lady of Sorrows at the centre with smaller roundels of Our Lord's Passion round about. J.S. Hansom extended the church in 1882 by building a domed sanctuary to incorporate an earlier chapel in a barn. The interior of the church is richly decorative and intricate. The ceiling vault is painted. Below, above the round arched arcaded, are framed paintings of the English Martyrs. Arches and columns frame the sanctuary.

Holy Trinity Church, Dorchester was originally built in "Middle Pointed" Gothic style for the Church of England in 1875-6 by Benjamin Ferrey. It was declared redundant in 1974 and acquired for Catholic use in 1976 to replace the previous church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, higher up West Street, originally designed by Canon Scoles in 1889 in Wareham and re-erected in Dorchester in 1906-7. The fittings of Holy Trinity are an amalgam of Anglican and Catholic. The onyx marble altar came from the earlier Catholic church. The 1897 reredos is from Oberammergau and some of the stained glass is by Kempe.

Both The Sacred Heart and St Aldhelm, Sherborne (1894) and The Holy Spirit and St Edward, Swanage (1904) are competent gothic churches by Canon Scoles, the latter for the Canons Regular of the Lateran.

The Holy Name and St Edward, Shaftesbury was built in 1909-10 by Edward Doran Webb (the architect of the Birmingham Oratory) for French priests of the Sons of Mary Immaculate. It is a well crafted and detailed Perpendicular building. The altar and reredos are attractively carved. The tower is of 1925.

St Joseph, Weymouth is an idiosyncratic and attractive church of 1934 designed by George Drysdale. It is clad in white-painted brick which with the tall western bellcote give it the flavour of a Spanish mission church.

Photo: image by Arcadia

This article appears in the October/November2025 edition of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre and counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door any where in the world click HERE.

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