Church of St Luke is a Grade II* listed building in the Caerphilly local planning authority area, Wales. First listed on 5 March 1987. House.
Church of St Luke
- WRENN ID
- haunted-forge-rook
- Grade
- II*
- Local Planning Authority
- Caerphilly
- Constituency
- Newport West and Islwyn MP: Ruth Jones (Lab)
- Country
- Wales
- Date first listed
- 5 March 1987
- Type
- House
- Address
- Church of St Luke, Abercarn
- OS grid reference
- ST 216 950
- Coordinates
- 51.64901, -3.13399
- Source
- Cadw listing
Description
The Church of St Luke is a large church built in a dramatically simplified Early Gothic style. It is constructed from roughly dressed freestone and concrete, with few ashlar dressings. The layout includes an aisled nave with parish rooms located on the lower ground floor at the west end, a tall south tower, a chancel with overlapping aisles, a north porch, and southeast vestries.
The two-storey west front features a tall, crenellated, and buttressed central bay, with buttresses that have offsets, a deep string course, and a battered plinth. There are long and narrow twin lancets with a sill band. At the lower level, there is a wide central entrance doorway with a deep recessed arch, a cyclopean hoodmould, imposts, and jambs, topped by a leaded fanlight over the lintel. The outer bays contain triple lancets above a wide pointed arched opening to the left, which has a further lower ground floor entrance doorway below it; to the right, there are two tiers of lancets. The nave clerestory and aisles are adorned with parapets, string courses, and waterspouts, featuring single and paired lancets, along with a tall chimney at the northwest.
The north porch has a square-headed doorway under a hoodmould that extends to the sides, made of cyclopean masonry, and the interior has a concrete vault. The east chancel parapet is stepped up, with a tunnel vault behind it, and the east window consists of five stepped lancets. The tall square tapered south tower includes a projecting stair turret, a corbelled crenellated top, paired louvred lancets in the bell chamber, and a round-arched doorway with an impost band, but no buttresses.
Inside, the church features exposed masonry and concrete, with wide uneven four-centred arches supported by polygonal piers that lack capitals in the nave arcades. Paired clerestory lancets are positioned over spandrels, and quadrant arches meet a similarly wide chancel arch. The ceilings are flat. There is one step up to the chancel, three steps to the sanctuary, and a flight of steps at the west end leads to the lower level entrance and rooms. No furnishings have survived.
Local climate
Church of St Luke sits in a wetter-than-average part of the UK, with an average of 1,000 mm of rain a year. This makes it wetter than 80% of listed buildings in the UK. Its exposure to wind-driven rain is greater than that of 77% of listed buildings.
It experiences an average of 33 freeze-thaw cycles a year, fewer than 56% of listed buildings. Of these, 13 follow at least 1 mm of rain in the preceding 48 hours. Average temperatures at this location have risen by 0.3°C per decade since 1991.
Averages for 1991–2020; temperature trend 1991–2025. Figures describe the wider area (a grid cell of roughly 10 km), not the individual site. Contains modified Copernicus Climate Change Service information 2026.
More on this building
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- No EPC on record for this property
- No sale records on file
- No related consent applications matched
- Detailed attributes — period, style, materials, features
- Flood risk assessment
- Radon risk assessment
- Weather exposure and heating demand — rain and frost month by month and year by year, wind direction, solar and humidity
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