Church of St Catwg

The Church of St Catwg is a small parish church built in the Decorated Gothic Revival style. It dates to the 19th century and is constructed of coursed rubble sandstone with coloured banding using red sandstone, with ashlar dressings also decoratively coloured and banded. The steep-pitched roof is covered in Welsh slate and features apex cruciform finials. The church consists of a tall nave with a slender, octagonal southwest turret, a shallow south porch, a slightly lower and narrower chancel, and a wide, extended north vestry. The turret is decorated with canopywork and is in the form of gabled buttresses to the lower stage, which has a deep battered plinth and appears open above. It includes a tall, slender spirelet with small pierced cinquefoil and lancet openings. The south porch has a steep-pitched roof with a high, pointed-arched moulded doorway featuring decorative voussoirs and buttresses with offsets, and reset monuments on either side. The nave and chancel primarily feature 2-light, pointed arched windows with curvilinear tracery, and are distinguished by prominent diagonal buttresses with stepped coping at the corners. Exceptionally large and elegantly decorated east and west windows also incorporate curvilinear tracery. The churchyard contains several early to mid-19th century chest tombs, notably to the southeast.

Inside, the walls are painted and rendered, with exposed ashlar dressings and a dark-stained boarded roof. The nave has five bays with arch-braced trusses, while the chancel has three bays with two tiers of windbraces. A high, wide, lightly moulded pointed chancel arch is present without capitals, and carved corbels within the chancel depict local ecclesiastics, added in 1910. A stone pulpit to the north features relief carvings of Saints David and Catwg, designed by Prichard and Seddon and later executed by Clarke of Llandaff. A carved reading desk, previously displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851, is also present. In the northwest corner are re-sited monuments to the Morgan family, alongside a medieval grave slab with an incised floriated cross and a Latin inscription reputedly commemorating a member of the Mathew family of Castell y Mynach. A holy water stoup is from the former church. A medieval round pedestal font is uniquely situated within the round belltower at the southwest, accessible through a glazed pointed doorway, while a 19th century octagonal font stands on clustered marble columns. The chancel is raised one step, the sanctuary is raised two steps, and features a later 20th century stone altar and an east window from the early 1900s by R J Newberry. The church also holds two bells, one pre-Reformation, engraved 'Sancta Catrina', and one from 1700, engraved 'William Howard’, along with a Wedding Cannon made in Pentyrch Ironworks by Thomas William Booker.