St John's Church

St John's Church is a small, unassuming church in simple lancet style, built of local rubble with a chamfered plinth and sandstone dressings. The original slate roof features decorative Westmoreland slate chevron and banding patterning in the manner of 15th-century Burgundian work. The building has slab-coped gable parapets with a gable cross at the east end.

At the west end stands a belfry with a slated fleche and simple iron cross-vane, with deep feathered eaves and pointed-arched bell openings fitted with wooden slatting. The south side features a single-storey gabled porch with a pointed-arched entrance decorated with broach stopped-chamfering. The porch floor is laid with quarry tiles in yellow and red counter-changed pattern, and an inner entrance repeats the pointed arch with a boarded door and simple ironwork.

The church has pointed-arched leaded lancet windows: four on the north side and three on the south, with 2-stage stepped buttresses dividing the bays and chamfered reveals. A tall pointed-arched window at the west end has stepped buttresses flanking it. The chancel is lower and narrower than the nave, with stepped buttresses and a simply-moulded stringcourse returned onto the sides and stepped up under the east window. The east window comprises three-light pointed-arched tracery with simple cusping and three lancets with two quatrefoil occuli.

A vestry extension adjoins the chancel to the north, featuring a single-light arched window to the east and a triple-arched window to the north. To the right of the latter is a plain boiler-room entrance with a recessed fragmentary boarded door and stopped-chamfered lintel. A plain chimney with a cornice rises in the roof angle between the vestry and the north side of the nave.

The interior features a four-bay aisle-less nave with simple X-framed trusses arched-braced onto shaped stone wall corbels. The walls are faced with knapped limestone, an alteration made in 1899 in imitation of knapped flint. A plain red tiled pavement runs down the centre, flanked by simple fixed pine pews. The simple octagonal limestone font stands on an octagonal shaft with a square chamfered base, carved with a cross in an oculus on one face of the bowl. An octagonal oak pulpit has broach-stopped chamfered reveals to relief-carved panels in two tiers and a moulded cornice with foliated bosses.

The chancel was brought forward by one bay during the 1899 remodelling. It features a seven-bay screen in simple Perpendicular style with a panelled dado and open upper section, depressed ogee tracery heads and crenellated brattishing to the beam, with a central surmounting cross. A stopped-chamfered pointed-arched chancel arch springs from abaci corbelled out from the soffit. The roof has plain clustered trusses and the walls are faced with yellow brick. Simple polychromed tiles pave the stepped-up chancel and sanctuary. The sanctuary retains simple altar rails, though the central section is missing, with cusped open quatrefoil decoration to the lower sections.

A plain panelled oak dado and a tripartite Perpendicular reredos with crenellated brattishing and open tracery decoration to the centre and blind tracery below complete the chancel fittings. The central panel contains a polychromed Last Supper relief cast, while flanking panels display painted depictions of scroll-bearing angels in Arts and Crafts style. A pointed arch to the vestry addition at the north features a three-quarter oak panelled screen dividing it from the chancel, with a doorway at the left and a four-part open arcaded upper section with segmental arches and Jacobean-style turned baluster-columns.

The east window contains good figurative stained glass with panels depicting Saint John the Baptist, David and the Evangelist, set against grisaille backgrounds. On the west wall is a simple marble dedication tablet with a pedimented sandstone surround, recording the restoration of the church in 1899 in memory of Major General E W L Wynne of Coed Coch.