Secondary sources such as folk lore, documentation (ledgers) of the church and general information about Ormskirk (e.g. name suggests Scandinavian origin) are much more reliable. These sources are more reliable because they are mainly records which are almost definite as opposed to guesses and estimations. Records also hold a lot of data allowing a researcher to retrieve more data from it to get a better idea of the origin of the subject, in this case, the church. Documentation is carefully recorded for a single purpose, that is to reference to it at a later date, which is what we're doing; this is better than, say, trying to get a date of something by looking at it (e.g. a date on a bell) because sometimes work is done sloppily or information from primary sources may be incorrect or misleading as I've mentioned in the first paragraph.
With regards to the first question, secondary sources are crucial for finding out when the spire and tower were built and whether or not two sisters (as described) even lived in Ormskirk or nearby at the earliest retrievable date, this information would be retrieved through early records, although they won't be from Orme's time, someone around the time of the earliest records might have done similar research to what I'm doing today and back then the primary sources were a great deal more reliable. That said, with regards to primary sources for the first question, there isn't much to go by anyway so secondary sources would be the only alternative.
Question 2, however, is much different. Primary sources are much more valuable mainly because the very nature of the question requires you to look at and study them. Primary sources in question 2 are much more convenient than secondary sources because, for the question, you have to go and study the features of the church and compare them to a generic church of the same style. Secondary sources are also useful as not only do they provide extra information but they also explain as to why the church is exceptional or not and how the exceptional features came to be so exceptional (e.g. documentation tells us why the church has a tower and a spire rather than the usual one or the other).
In conclusion, primary sources were very usual in question 2 and without them then the question would have been much harder and would have required much more research using secondary sources but the primary sources for question weren't very useful at all, if anything they could have potentially harmed my research by providing me with the wrong information. Secondary sources, however, were extremely useful for question 1 and without them almost all of the question would have been guesswork and would have been near to impossible not to mention very unreliable. In question 2 also, the secondary sources were reliable and useful and helped a great deal with comparing the features of the Ormskirk Parish Church to those of other churches. Which sources you use entirely depend on the question you're answering, for most questions though there are a good selection of useful primary and secondary sources, most of which are reliable and invaluable in providing the right information for you to answer the question you're studying.
