Christ Church is located about 0.5km south-east of the village in remote enclosed moorland in a rectangular churchyard used as a cemetery. It was built in a Victorian Decorated style in 1857 to designs of diocesan architect Henry Kennedy at the expense of Thomas Assheton Smith whose family owned the Dinorwic Slate Quarry. The intention was to provide an Anglican place of worship close to the quarry. The church is aligned north-east to south-west rather than true east-west. It is constructed of roughly coursed rock-faced rubblestone with ashlar dressings, including to plinth and continuous cill band, and gable-ended slate roofs with stepped coping and stumpy stone crosses to the gables. It consists of nave, chancel, north and south aisles, north-east vestry, gable-ended south organ chamber, gabled south-west porch and western tower with spire. The nave is hidden from view by the two equal-height, separately roofed, aisles. The tower is of four stages with corner buttresses and half-octagonal stone-capped staircase turret at its north-east corner rising to the second stage, and capped with a tall broached spire.
The Decorated interior is largely unaltered. The high nave and aisle roofs are arch-braced in five bays on carved stone corbels with vertical struts linking the curved braces and collars; the exposed rafters are carried down as vertical studs below wall-plate to parallel rails beneath. The pointed hollow-chamfered aisle arcades also in five bays supported on alternating circular and octagonal columns with moulded plinths and capitals and carved responds at the east end. The chancel roof is arch-braced in three bays with cusping to principal rafters which rest on decorated stone corbels.The former organ chamber on the south is now made into a side chapel which now contains an altar and altar rail from the disused St Mary's Church, Dinorwic. Original fittings in the nave include a complete set of Victorian pews, wooden pulpit, octagonal font with trefoiled panels, clustered shafts to base and elaborate font cover and brass lectern. The chancel is three steps up from the nave and the sanctuary three steps up again where the east window has nineteenth-century stained glass. The small octagonal font on a shaft pedestal now in the south aisle also comes from St Mary's.
Sources:
Cadw Listing description.
R.Haslam, J.Orbach & Adam Voelcker, Buildings of Wales: Gwynedd (2009), p.358.

RCAHMW, 16 February 2016