St Edmunds King & Marthyr Parish Church

St Edmunds King & Marthyr is a parish church, largely dating from the 14th century, with significant Victorian alterations and additions. The church comprises a nave with north and south aisles, transepts, a northeast chapel, a crossing tower with a spire, a chancel with a south vestry, and a main entrance to the west end. Constructed primarily of local red sandstone rubble walls, the roofs are tiled with cresting, and the spire is covered in shingles. Decorative freestone dressings are present, including gable parapets and crucifix finials.

The two-bay chancel features some replacement lancet windows and head-stopped hood moulds with relieving arches. A three-light east window has intersecting tracery and a dropped cill, with hood moulds and voussoirs. A Victorian priest's porch was converted to a vestry in 1973, incorporating an acutely pointed double cusped window in a blocked former doorway and a blocked Y-tracery window on the east side. The transepts are single bay, with two-light Geometrical windows and hood moulds with ball stops. An extension with a cat-slide roof to the north transept has lancet windows and a rubble chimney stack. The central tower, unusually for Wales, has an octagonal broach spire (shingled in 1963) topped with a weathervane, and a corbelled parapet with gargoyles likely part of Pearson's restoration. Cusped, louvred lancets are set at the bell stage; clock faces are on the north and south sides. The three-bay nave has parallel Victorian pitched roofs. Geometrical windows have replaced original intersecting tracery, with an octagonal chimney stack on the north aisle. The west front has three gables and is heavily buttressed, with aisle windows flanking a central three-light window of Decorated type with impaled trefoils, and prominent cill bands. A coursed rubble porch was built in 1832 and rebuilt in 1974; corbelling suggests its original form was a lean-to. A boarded door is set within voussoirs.

Inside, a fine group of monuments is set within 13th-century style recesses: two on the south side and three on the north. A recess on the northeast side, created in 1865, has a stilted arch and foliated stops, and contains reset recumbent alabaster figures of Sir John and Lady Joan Herbert, dated 1690. An early 14th-century monument portrays Lady Sibyl Pauncefote without hands, referencing the Pauncefote legend. Sir Grimbald Pauncefote (died 1287) is depicted with broken limbs, with commemorative tiles added in 1926. Other monuments date from the 17th and 18th centuries. A cusped sedilia and a single-drain piscina are present. A Gothic reredos in Caen stone, dating from 1894 and made by Nicholson of Hereford, depicts ‘The Last Supper’; the Rumsey arms are to the right of the High Altar. Gothic brass altar rails are also present. The transepts are designated as Rumsey (south) and Gwernvale (north) chapels. A Perpendicular screen and reredos to the south were designed by W D Caroe in 1934, and a south window has glass by C A Gibbs. An organ is located in the north. The nave has octagonal piers and bays of unequal width, with chamfered two-order arcades and voussoirs. Buttresses were added to the west end when the aisles were removed. A 14th-century cusped niche is located at the east end of the south aisle. Victorian roofs are throughout the building; rib vaulting with flying braces is under the tower and in the chancel.