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
St. Barnabas, Brampton Bryan
St. Barnabas, like Brampton Bryan village and neighbouring castle, was destroyed in 1643 in the civil war. It was rebuilt in 1656 by the Castle’s family, the Harley family. The head of the family in the 1640s and much of the 50s was one Sir Robert Harley, who was one of the Godly leaders in Herefordshire. His wife, Brilliana, had been home during the seiges of the 1640s, and fell fatally ill during one of them. Her letters – some 200-odd, to her husband and eldest son, Edward – have survived and have been extensively studied, particularly in Jaqueline Eales’s book, Puritans and Roundheads. I was fortunate enough to have been able to visit the grounds of the castle in 2015 with Herefordshire Victoria County History. The Castle is privately owned (by the Harley family, and is not usually open to the public) but on that occasion we ran out of time to visit the church, so that one was missed out – until 4th September 2017, at least.
Brampton Bryan Castle ruins (with Brampton Bryan Hall to the left, which was built in 1661-2 and largely rebuilt in 1748).
This was the final of the three churches I visited on 17th July 2017. St. Margarets parish is near Clodock – it took around 20 minutes to drive there via winding narrow country lanes – and is a beautiful small two-cell church. The main reason for visiting was the ‘deliciously carved’ rood screen/loft¹. As with the previous blogs in this series, 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 St Margaret’s church, then more information can be found here.
The sixteenth-century south porch doorway to St Margaret’s church
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).
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