St Patrick’s Chapel ruins, Heysham: The mythical Lancashire ruins with a heavenly view

Annunciata Elwes takes a look at St Patrick’s Chapel ruins, a Morecambe Bay landmark.

There’s a myth that the patron saint of Ireland built this chapel after a shipwreck, but no matter how good Guinness is (or isn’t) for you, he can’t have managed it 200 years after his death. The view over Morecambe Bay from this exposed clifftop is staggering and the 8th-century ruins are only a little uphill from Norman St Peter’s Church.

The ruins of St. Patrick’s Chapel.

A walk around the graveyard is a reminder of how easy it is to drown when gathering cockles and mussels on this treacherous coast, but the lives of the eight buried in sandstone-hewn graves at the chapel centuries earlier are more mysterious; the graves are among Britain’s earliest examples of Christian burial and appear on the album sleeve for The Best of Black Sabbath.

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