All Saints, Forden

All Saints (also known as St Mary the Virgin, Trelystan) is a Grade II* church high on Long Mountain in the community of Forden with Leighton and Trelystan, Powys. Cadw lists it as the only surviving timber-framed church in Montgomeryshire. The historic parish lies in Wales but remains in the Church of England Diocese of Hereford.

Overview

Cadw dates an early fifteenth-century church thoroughly restored in 1856, when the timber frame was encased with painted brick nogging on a rubble plinth. The plan is a single-cell nave and chancel under one slate roof, with south porch, weatherboarded west bellcote with pyramidal roof, and a north vestry. Windows are timber-mullioned with trefoil heads; the east window has intersecting timber tracery.

The interior keeps a fifteenth-century arched-braced roof with some nineteenth-century timber, hammer beams (said to be sawn-off tie beams, now with iron ties) and cusped wind bracing. Walls are boarded in pitch pine. Cadw notes a five-light fragment of a medieval rood screen, a Perpendicular-style octagonal font, and flagstones with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century memorial slabs. The east glass of the Garden of Gethsemane is said to be by David Evans of Shrewsbury; a later stained-glass catalogue attributes an 1857 east window to Charles Clutterbuck.

Further Information

• Cadw listed building 19546
• Coflein NPRN 149330