Parish Church of St Odoceus

The Parish Church of St Odoceus is a Grade II listed building featuring an aisless nave, a squat and tapering two-stage west tower, and a lower, narrower chancel. Constructed from local red sandstone, the church has rubble walls with quoins and dressed window surrounds, topped with slate roofs. The tower has a pyramidal roof with swept out overhanging eaves, gable parapets, and a crucifix finial at the east end of the nave. The bell stage has lancet openings on the west and south sides with modern louvres, while below are segmental-headed windows. A stepped-out stair vice is located on the north side. The entrance is on the south side, featuring a pointed arch chamfered doorway with weathered spur bases and boarded doors. To the left of the entrance is a Perpendicular two-light square-headed window set into a larger blocked opening, and to the right is a two-light Decorated window with Victorian tracery that echoes the medieval design found on the north side. The chancel has two-light windows, square-headed on the north and pointed on the east and south, all with renewed tracery but retaining medieval rere arches.

Inside, the church has a plain whitewashed interior with open trusses. The nave is four bays long with deep segmental-headed window splays; the Perpendicular window includes a window seat. There is a pointed arch leading into the tower chamber, which has a boarded door opening onto a stone vice. The church once had a roof loft, as indicated by corbels and an opening above the semicircular chancel arch. The chancel is three bays long, featuring Perpendicular hoodmoulds on the south side window, a pointed arched recess, and a piscina beyond, which likely served as a tomb and has carved head stops and a foliated apex. On the north side, there is a later 14th-century recumbent effigy, probably of Margaret Marlos, depicted with tightly folded clothes and a wimple; it is broken in three places, referencing the legend that she was cut into three pieces by robbers, and was placed here in 1902. At the end of the nave is an Early Christian carved stone slab, formerly a doorstep, with Ogham and Roman inscriptions, likely from the 5th or 6th century. The church also contains one mid-19th-century wall tablet by Mainwaring of Carmarthen and two 18th-century floor monuments. The church was partly overgrown at the time of inspection in January 1988.