page_title: Heptonstall
section_title: Church
hierarchical_section_title: Heptonstall / Community / Church
caption_attribution_description: English: The bells of St Thomas the Apostle parish church, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, before being installed in the tower in 1912
context_page_description: Heptonstall is a small village and civil parish within the Calderdale borough of West Yorkshire, England, historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire. The population of Heptonstall, including the hamlets of Colden and Slack Top, is 1,448, increasing to 1,470 at the 2011 Census. The town of Hebden Bridge lies directly to the south-east. Although Heptonstall is part of Hebden Bridge as a post town, it is not within the Hebden Royd town boundaries.
  The village is on the route of the Calderdale Way, a 50-mile circular walk around the hills and valleys of Calderdale.
context_section_description: Heptonstall's original church was dedicated to St Thomas a Becket. It was founded c.1260, and was altered and added to over several centuries. The church was damaged by a gale in 1847, and is now only a shell. A new church, St Thomas the Apostle, was built in the same churchyard. This suffered a lightning strike in 1875.
  The church has good acoustics, and is used for the annual Pennine Spring Music Festival, held every Spring Bank Holiday week. This includes workshops, masterclasses and performances. The old church ruin is occasionally used for open-air services.
  The tower of the new church contains eight bells, cast in 1912 by John Taylor & Co. These were removed to a bell foundry for refurbishment on 31 August 2012 and were returned, with new bearings, in October 2012.
  The American poet Sylvia Plath, who was married to Poet Laureate Ted Hughes from nearby Mytholmroyd, is buried in the graveyard extension, to the south-west of St Thomas a' Beckett's churchyard. Plath's headstone has been several times vandalised by removing Hughes's surname from the memorial, because some of her fans believe he was responsible for her death.
  Another poet buried here is the American expatriate Asa Benveniste, a co-founder in London of the publisher Trigram Press. In the 1980s Benveniste and his partner Agnetha Falk ran a secondhand bookshop in Hebden Bridge. His gravestone reads: "Foolish Enough to Have Been a Poet".
caption: Heptonstall new tower bells before being installed in the tower in 1912.
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