The last church that we visited on 4th September 2017 was that of St John the Bapist and St Alkmund, at Aymestry. Like Wigmore and Brampton Bryan that we also visited that day, it is in the North-west of Herefordshire. Aymestry is a small village that is part of the Mortimer Trail, and the church is to be found just off the A4110, the main road running through the village.
Church of St John the Bapist and St Alkmund
Another one of the churches that I visited on 17th July 2017. St. Clydawg lies in the parish of Clodock and Longtown in Herefordshire, not far from Abbey Dore (still in the Golden Valley). It is an early church; a church has stood here to St. Clydawg from around 500 A.D. The unusual name is for one Clydawg, the son of Cledwyn, King of Ewias, who was murdered; when he was buried, the oxen pulling the cart refused to cross the river Monnow, so he was buried near the river bank. He was regarded as a martyr and people began to worship at his tomb; the church was built and a settlement grew up around it, called Llan (enclosure) Y Merthyr Clydawg, or Clodock. The church was restored in the seventeenth century, and today has a lot of seventeenth-century surviving material, hence my visit. As with my previous Abbey Dore blog post, the rest of this is primarily photographs with the occasional explanatory text.
If you’d like to visit St Clydawg, then the details can be found here.
The path leading up to St Clydawg, or St Clydog, from the road and Lychgate (which is a modern reproduction of the original).
Dore Abbey, one of only two former Cistercian Abbeys still used as a parish church in England (the other is Holme Cultram, or Abbey Town in Cumberland, according to Pevsner’s book on Herefordshire), was the first on the list of churches that I visited on 17th July 2017. The Abbey suffered the usual dissolution on March 1, 1537, being bought primarily by John Scudamore. It was his great-great-grandson, John Viscount Scudamore who restored the church in 1632-33. What remains today is what was the presbytery, crossing and transepts (the nave has largely gone), although ruins around the church allow the visitor, with the help of the guidebook and map, to work out what would have been where. Scudamore was a friend of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, and the church was rebuilt in ‘Laudian’ style. As such, it was one of the first to go onto my list of churches to visit in Herefordshire. My visit was primarily focused on the seventeenth century elements (as that is where my PhD is focused) but archaeological digs took place around the church either side of the turn of the 20th century and the items dug up then have been placed inside the church and are available to view by visitors. I also took photographs of some of the other, non-seventeenth-century elements. The remainder of this blog is focused on a few of the photographs that I took that day, with some explanatory text beneath each one.
If you’d like to visit Dore Abbey, or would like more information, then their website can be found here, or a website on the churches of Herefordshire can be found here.
The church, seen from the main path leading down from the road. This was not the original, pre-reformation approach to the church but has been put in later, after the 1632-33 restoration.
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