St Mary the Virgin, Abbeycwmhir

St Mary's is a Grade II* Church in Wales parish church in the centre of Abbeycwmhir, Powys, in the Diocese of Swansea and Brecon.

Overview

Cadw records a church of 1865-66 by J. W. Poundley, Montgomeryshire county surveyor, and David Walker of Liverpool, replacing a seventeenth-century church. The principal benefactor was Miss Mary Philips, for whose family the same architects designed the adjacent Hall. The design is French High Gothic: nave with a lower, narrower chancel, south porch-tower with spire, north-east organ chamber and north-west vestry. Walls are snecked rock-faced stone with red sandstone banding and patterned arch heads; the slate roof has three bands of lighter grey slates. A rainwater head on the north side is dated 1866. The two-stage porch-tower has a sculpted Ascension in the tympanum and a freestone octagonal spire with a belvedere. Windows have geometrical tracery; the west window is three-light with cusped wheel tracery and the east end a polygonal apse.

The nave has a four-bay scissor-truss roof on foliage corbels. A stone screen base carries a brass plaque commemorating consecration in 1866. The chancel has a boarded polygonal wagon roof, decorative floor tiles and a Caen stone reredos of the Last Supper in thirteenth-century French style, with mosaic panels of the Agnus Dei and Pelican of Piety. A grave slab of about 1200 to Mabli, an abbot of Cwmhir, excavated from the abbey in 1824-25, is reset in the nave. Chancel glass is by Heaton, Butler and Bayne; the west window is by Clayton and Bell.

Further Information

• Cadw listed building 9346
• British Listed Buildings: Church of St Mary, Abbey Cwmhir
• Coflein: St Mary's Church, Abbey Cwmhir