Beetle infestation puts Wigan church on at-risk register | Manchester News

An infestation of deathwatch beetles has led to an Elizabethan church being put on Historic England’s at-risk register.

St Wilfrid’s Church, in Wigan, Greater Manchester, is among 138 sites added to the list this year after the insects damaged its decorative timber ceilings.

Services are continuing at the Grade I-listed church in Standish despite the erection of scaffolding to investigate the scale of the problem, its rector Reverend Andrew Holliday said.

He told Radio Manchester that beetle larvae “burrow into the wood and just chomp away at it, creating lots of dust in the process”.

“What it does is effectively eat it away. In the chancel area, what we’ve discovered is actually some catastrophic damage that the beetle has done over a number of years.

“Some of the enormous timbers are actually hollow.”

The addition of the church to the register will “bring people’s attention to the buildings that need it most”, Florence Salberter, from Historic England, said.

She compared it to a “health check”, adding: “It really shows that we need to focus on these buildings, on churches, that have been there for communities for centuries.”

Rev Holliday said current investigations exploring the scale of the problem will “give us a broad scope of what we’re really dealing with”.

He continued: “And then we’ll begin the whole process of planning next steps and next stages – which is not only the work itself and what’s involved – but also some major grant funding that we will be seeking to help us look after this incredible building.”