AFTER looking at listed buildings in Billinge and Blackbrook, my spotlight this week falls on Eccleston.

The ward has several candidates and I have selected Christ Church - a small sandstone construction in the leafy district. It was built in 1838, courtesy of the generosity of the same Samuel Taylor who donated land for the town's largest Victorian park - Taylor Park.

The building, of rock-faced red sandstone ashlar - made by masons of large square-cut stones, used as a facing on walls of brick or stone rubble - from a nearby quarry at Eccleston Hill, was raised alongside a grassy cart track and is the oldest of the present churches in the borough, so I am told.

Inside, the church has memorials to those heroes who fell in both WWI and WWII.

Four years after it opened, it hosted the wedding of Richard Seddon's parents.

The most famous person buried there is Thomas Nuttall, who died in 1859. He was a pioneer naturalist in America from 1808 until 1841. During that period he crossed the North American continent to the Pacific Ocean with several scientific expeditions and also visited the Hawaiian Islands.

Nuttall drew and collected new species of plants that were unknown to science at the time, and sent some to Liverpool Botanical Gardens, where descendants can be seen at various locations in the city.

He visited Milledgeville in Georgia long before me, he to visit friends, me to visit the small town where Oliver Hardy grew up.