St. Mary's Church

St. Mary's Church

A Decorated Gothic style church built of random rubble with sandstone dressings. The building features a continuous sill band and plinth, offset angled buttresses, and a slate roof with stone copings. The plan comprises a nave of 3 bays, a shorter narrower chancel to the east with a single pitched roof, a north transept, a square bell tower to the west with crocket finials, and a steeply pitched roofed porch to the southwest of the nave.

The windows display reticulated tracery with sandstone labels and relieving arches above. The nave windows have floriated label stops, whilst those in the chancel feature human faces. The nave contains 3-light windows flanking the porch, a single light window to the right, and paired lights to the far right. The north wall has a 3-light window at the west end, paired 2-light windows in the central bay, and a 4-light window to the east end. The chancel has a 3-light south window and a 5-light window in the east gable. The porch entrance is a pointed arch of 4 chamfered orders.

The west tower is of 3 stages. The lower stage features a chamfered arched doorway on its west face. The middle stage has a 3-light window, with a bell stage above two strings. A clock face occupies the bell stage. Each face of the bell stage contains pointed arched vents with cusped tracery to the upper part and a hood mould, set within a rectangular recess with a corbelled head. A bracketed string runs over. The north transept has a single square-headed window and a camber-headed door in its east wall.

Inside, the walls are plastered and painted. The nave comprises 6 roof bays and the chancel 3 roof bays, both featuring exposed collared trusses with cusped braces carried down to wall posts and corbels bearing shield designs on the facing panels. The chancel is raised by 3 steps and separated from the nave by an arch of 4 chamfered orders. The sanctuary is raised a further 2 steps and contains a granite reredos of 3 bays across the east wall. The central bay is advanced with cusped panels to the lower part; the upper part contains a single panel carved with the Last Supper. The flanking bays have cusped panels. The reredos was erected in 1885 as a memorial to Arabella Holt, from her sister Elizabeth Archerley Symes.

The west tower contains an arch of 2 orders, now blocked, with a pointed entrance doorway and a circular modern stained glass window above. A circular staircase in the southwest corner, lit by small open lights, provides access to the bell stage. The north transept, reached by a pointed arch doorway, contains an organ blower and vestry.

The stained glass includes several dated windows with commemorative inscriptions: in the nave north wall east window, scenes of the nativity (1882, to Colonel Henry Capel Sandys); the central window (1890, to Edwin Capel Sandys); in the south wall east window (1876, to Lady Sarah Hay Williams); an east central window (1878, to William Mason Crowthers, agent to Rhianfa Estate); a central window (1893, to Richard Norman, Captain Royal Fusiliers); and in the chancel east window, the Ascension (1869, to Pamela Holt).

Notable fittings include an octagonal granite font carved with floriate designs in quatrefoil recesses in each panel, set on a circular granite column with four pink marble outer columns topped by stiff-leafed foliage. The font was presented in 1900 by Alice Morgan of Plascoedmor to her husband, Francis Frederick Richard Mansell Morgan. The pulpit is octagonal pine with four facing panels featuring cusped carving to the upper part. The pews and choir stalls are of pitch pine. A brass sanctuary rail on twisted stanchions and ornate foliate brackets, dated 1911, was given in memory of A R Moulsdale.

A copper cross on wood serving as a war memorial is mounted on the north wall of the nave.