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.

Unusual rock cut graves next to the ruins of St. Patrick's Chapel overlooking Morecambe Bay, Heysham.
Unusual rock cut graves next to the ruins of St. Patrick's Chapel overlooking Morecambe Bay, Heysham.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

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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Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.