Ormskirk No 1 / Ormeskierk / Ormeskirk / Ormiskirk

No individual entry found for Ormskirk in the Domesday survey. Dixon (1878) informs of a fragment of a font found here: "A portion of what may have been a Norman font, the predecessor of this, is inserted in the external wall of the eastern gable of the church." Ellis (1902) refers to a paper in an earlier issue of the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire (1877-1878) in which "Mr. James Dixon refers to a fragment of what appears to have been a Norman font, inserted in the external wall of the eastern gable of the church. I have not been able to discover this fragment; and what the author of the same paper believes to have been the base of an E[arly] E[nglish] font, which was discovered on the north side of the main pier of the spire, appears to have been covered up or destroyed during the restoration of the church. The present font bears the date 1661." [NB: the Victoria County History (Lancaster, vol. 3, 1907) notes: "The earliest part of the building is the north wall of the chancel; its date is about 1170", but we have no information on the baptismal font of that period, other than what is noted in Dixon [cf. supra].