Church of St Peter

Church of St Peter

A Victorian parish church in Early English style, dating from 1863 and comprising a nave and chancel, a south porch with an attached bell turret, and a vestry adjoining the chancel to the north. The church was built under the patronage of John Jesse of Llanbedr Hall, with architects Poundley and Walker and contractor James Porleys, as recorded on a marble dedication plaque inside.

The exterior is constructed of pale grey rock-faced stone with darker stone banding (the pale and dark stones alternating in the voussoirs), bathstone dressings, and plate tracery. The roof is original purple slate with grey slate bands and terracotta ridge tiles to the nave, which has stone wheelcrosses to the gables; the chancel features wrought-iron brattishing with a wheelcross.

The nave comprises four bays with alternating one-light and two-light plate tracery windows with foiled heads, and has stepped buttresses at each end. The south porch has a steeply pitched gable and a pointed-arched doorway with a trefoil head, flanked by stumpy columns with heavy foliated capitals. A circular foiled window occupies the west side of the porch. The porch entrance has wire bird doors with red and black counter-changed pavement, and a chamfered, broach-stopped inner entrance arch with double boarded doors and decorative ironwork. Immediately to the right of the porch stands a square turret with an octagonal open bell stage. Its stumpy columns support a spire with lucarnes and crockets, topped by a wrought-iron wheel cross.

The west window has three lights with plate tracery and a foiled head. The chancel has two single-light windows to the south, and a polygonal east end where single-light windows rise above the eaves, each with gables flanked by gargoyles. The vestry, adjoining the chancel to the north, has a steep hipped roof, a pointed-arched entrance with a boarded door approached via three steps, a plain two-stage chimney to the north, and two square-headed windows to the east.

Original cast iron downpipes and hoppers, dated 1863, survive.

The interior features a four-bay aisleless nave with scissor-braced roof trusses, which are alternately arched-braced and supported on foliated stone corbels and tiny columns with shaft-rings. Original grained pine pews with simple decorative pew-ends line the nave, and a central black and red patterned pavement runs through it.

A Perpendicular-style octagonal font of painted stone stands in the nave, of conventional type with a moulded plinth, octagonal base, and a bowl with blind tracery panels on each face. An octagonal pulpit of grained pine on an octagonal stone base features tracery panels to its main faces and has wooden stepped access on the north side with columnar balusters.

The chancel is stepped up and accessed by a large chancel arch with moulded and hollow-chamfered detail featuring ball flower ornament. The chancel has a wooden compartmented waggon roof with diagonal bracing and carved foliate bosses at the intersection points. A vestry doorway on the north side of the chancel comprises a deeply recessed shouldered arch with flanking stiff-leafed capitals; above it is a marble dedication plaque recording the church's erection in 1863. Adjacent to the vestry doorway to the west is a wide moulded arched niche on the north side of the chancel, occupied by an oak organ in simple French Renaissance style. To the left of the chancel arch is an associated Early English style wrought iron grille to the organ chamber.

Original choirstalls feature raised and fielded, cusped, multi-panel fronts with carved foliate decoration to the bench-ends and supporting ringed shafts. Simple oak altar rails, supported on partly gilded wrought-iron tracery piers, lead to the stepped-up sanctuary. The pavement in this area features encaustic tiles by Maw and Co.

Monuments in the nave include a mural monument on the south wall to Edward Lloyd of Berth and Rhagatt (died 1859), executed by John Gibson, RA, signed and dated 1863. This comprises a grey marble tablet with an arched top and a relief profile in white marble set within a recessed roundel. Adjacent is a large classical monument to Ursula, wife of Hugh Lloyd of Berth (died 1795), removed from the old church of St Peter and reset here around 1863, by S and T Franceys of Liverpool. It consists of a white marble tablet with moulded cornice, a surmounting sculpted figure of Faith, a shallow obelisk of dark grey figured marble behind, and a shaped grey marble apron with a wreathed heraldic roundel. Also on the south wall is a large grey marble benefactors' board on a black marble background, dated 1787, which originated in the old St Peter's.

The north wall of the nave displays several monuments removed from the old church: a simple classical monument in white and grey marble to Joseph Ablett Esq of Llanbedr Hall (died 1848); a Grecian mural tablet in white marble to John Jones of Jesus College, Oxford, Archdeacon of Meirionedd (died 1835), with a surmounting draped and gadrooned urn and a black marble obelisk behind; and a simple tablet to William Greene, Rector (died 1782), together with his wife Sidney (died 1798) and later family members, erected in 1823. A particularly fine early 14th-century sepulchral slab fragment, found at the old church in recent years, is displayed in the porch.

The stained and painted glass includes contemporary figurative panels by Clayton and Bell in the chancel east windows, depicting scenes from the Passion in an early 13th-century style. The nave north windows include a fine memorial window of 1886 in memory of Jane Bacon, and a memorial window of 1918 to Dr G Crace-Colbert. The nave south windows are by Shrigley and Hunt, dated 1898.