St Beuno, Clynnog Fawr

St Beuno’s is a Grade I late-medieval parish church at Clynnog Fawr, Gwynedd, one of the outstanding churches of North Wales, with an attached shrine chapel on the pilgrimage route to Bardsey.

Overview

Cadw records that Beuno is said to have founded a community here about 616 and to have died about 640–42. Clynnog became one of the two great clas churches of Arfon. The eastern crossing of the present building was erected about 1480–86; the nave was extended west about twenty years later; the west tower and a two-storey vestry were added in the early sixteenth century, perhaps under Dr William Glynne. The chapel of St Beuno was rebuilt about 1500–10 as an independent shrine, doubling an earlier chapel, and linked to the church by a vaulted passage of Irish vernacular character in the early seventeenth century. Restorations followed in 1848–56, 1913, 1924, 1926–28 and 1940.

The church is of large-scale local gritstone rubble with sandstone dressings and lead roofs behind crenellated parapets. Perpendicular windows include a huge seven-light east window and five-light transept gables. The spacious interior has a late-fifteenth-century hammer-beam roof, a rood screen of 1531 (restored 1940), choir stalls of about 1500 with misericords, and Cyff Beuno, an iron-bound hollowed trunk chest. The chapel houses Maen Beuno, a boulder inscribed with a simple cross of seventh- to ninth-century date. The church is open daily; the well is always open.

Further Information

• Cadw listed building report 3758
• Beuno Sant Uwch Gwyrfai
• Coflein: St Beuno’s Church, Clynnog Fawr