St Augustine's Parish Church

St Augustine's Parish Church

A Victorian Gothic church in the spare Early English style, distinguished by a distinctive saddleback tower. The building comprises a chancel with a south transept organ chamber and north vestry over a boiler room, an aisled nave, a southwest saddleback tower, and a northwest porch. The external walls are faced in Leckwith limestone with bathstone dressings and bands, red Staffordshire tiles, and some Radyr stone shafts.

The exterior features parapet gables with carved crucifix finials and moulded kneelers. A stepped sill band with quatrefoil panels runs beneath the three-light Geometric East window. Low set-back buttresses have steep set-offs. The organ chamber displays grouped lancets with a small oculus, while the aisle walls show paired lancets (single towards the west) in shallow clerestorey panels with banding as on the East wall. Aisle lights are grouped and divided by buttresses with sill bands. The four-storey west tower rises with a weathercock finial and features corbelled saddle work, twin re-used lancets to the bell openings, triple arcades to the lower storey, and corner buttresses.

The main entrance comprises a simple pointed archway of two orders with chamfered and cavetto mouldings, a hoodmould, and an impost stringcourse. The doors are double boarded with fine foliage hinges and fretted ironwork banding incorporating the door handle. A four-light plate tracery window with twin panels below the sill band occupies the west gable. A remarkable quatrefoil marks the north aisle end and is overlapped by a cross-gabled northwest porch with a shafted outer archway reached by steps. The tall northeast vestry displays fine twin round stacks and a ragged gable crucifix above an unusual three-light plate tracery window, with offset doorways (up and down steps) beneath a catslide roof. The east wall contains typical shouldered lights.

Polychrome brick patterns and bathstone dressings appear on red brick internal facings. The chancel roof is low-pitched with a stilted profile, stellar pattern ribs, and a crenellated wall plate. The steeper nave roof is similar with wall posts to main trusses. Low cusped and cavetto arched recesses of banded stone occupy the sanctuary with spandrel quatrefoils below stringcourses that step up to form hoodmoulds over banded arched openings to the north and south. A Gothic screen stands on the north side. The south organ was installed in 1898 and is by William Hill. Decorative brass altar rails, a chequered marble reredos, and a patterned tiled floor complete the chancel furniture. Georgian tablets and a Gothic fireplace with piscina are preserved in the rector's vestry.

The chancel arch is banded and chamfered, set upon semi-octagonal responds. A medieval carved stone churchyard cross with a modern base stands to the southwest side of the building (brought from the churchyard; Scheduled Ancient Monument, Cadw Reference Gm 227). The two-storey nave elevation features deeply splayed clerestorey lancets with marble shafts and trefoil roundels to the spandrels of paired lights. A stringcourse of saw-tooth brickwork steps down towards the east end. The fully diapered arcades consist of chamfered arches supported by alternating octagonal and cylindrical piers, with foiled sunk roundels and lettered inscriptions to the spandrels. The west wall is diapered on the upper part as the clerestorey and carries a war memorial below the window. A traceried octagonal timber pulpit, an octagonal font with marble shafts, and stained glass probably by E W Gibbs to designs by Butterfield complete the interior.

The oval churchyard contains fine 19th-century monuments, including that of Dr Joseph Parry, a pillar of white marble surmounted by a lyre. A roughly coursed rubble boundary wall encloses the churchyard, with a scallop-shell cast iron drinking fountain inset at the southwest corner.