St Mary's Church, Thirsk

St Mary's is Thirsk's parish church and the building that closes the view up Kirkgate. It is Perpendicular Gothic, the late medieval style that traded solid wall for glass, and the fifteenth-century work is what people come to see. It is often described as one of the finest Perpendicular parish churches in North Yorkshire, a claim worth treating as a local reputation rather than an official ranking, though one look at the scale of the windows explains where it comes from. Entry is free. For a town that charges for its other headline attractions, half an hour in here costs you nothing but the walk.

From Tea Time Cafe at 87 Market Place, take Kirkgate out of the square and simply keep going. The church is at the end of the street, five to seven minutes at an ordinary pace, on flat pavement the whole way. You pass Thirsk Museum and the World of James Herriot en route, which is why most people fold the church into a Kirkgate morning rather than making a separate trip of it.

We have not been able to confirm whether the entrance is step-free, and the same goes for toilets and other facilities. If that matters, contact the parish before you set off. There is no dedicated visitor car park, so leave the car on the Market Place, where the first hour is free, and walk up.

Walk the outside first. The scale of the windows and the tower reads better from the churchyard than it does from inside the door, and the churchyard itself is a quiet circuit worth five minutes on a dry day.

Then go in, if the door is open, for the nave and the font. Perpendicular churches are built to be looked at upwards, so give yourself a minute standing still before you start reading anything. Twenty to thirty minutes covers a visit at a sensible pace. This is a working parish church rather than a museum, so services come first and there is no set route round.

The architecture is the whole case, and specifically the fifteenth-century Perpendicular work: the glass, the height and the way the nave carries it. The churchyard is the other half of the visit and the part people skip. And the position matters more than it sounds, because the church anchors the top of Kirkgate and gives the street its shape all the way down to the square.

Treat the opening hours as a bonus rather than a plan. The church is generally open in daylight hours, but exact times are not published and services take priority, so if the door is shut the exterior and the churchyard still justify the six-minute walk. Go on the same trip as the two Kirkgate museums, since all three sit on one street and the sequence works well: the free volunteer museum, the Herriot house, then the church at the top. Bring a coin or two for the donation box. Morning light is better for photographs of the windows from outside. And if you want certainty on access, dogs or facilities, ring the parish first, because none of that is documented anywhere we could verify.