Welsh Journals

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'THE NEW AND VERY SATISFACTORY CHURCH OF LLANDYGWYDD': THE TRANSIENT GLORY OF A FLAWED EDIFICE, 1857-1980 The village of Llandygwydd stands astride the lower reaches of a small north bank tributary of the River Teifi, some four miles from Cardigan, about six miles from Newcastle Emlyn, and about half a mile from the A484 road that runs between Cardigan and Newcastle Emlyn. The village takes its name from an obscure fifth or sixth century Celtic saint, Tygwy or Tegwy, to whom the parish church is dedicated. Its sheltered location, hugging the base of a wooded valley side gives the village an air of seclusion which even the coming of motorised transport has failed to dispel altogether. For most of the Christian Era the church was easily the most distinctive building in the vil- lage. The church that was erected during the 1850s, complete with a massive spire-capped tower, was judged by some to be not only a 'very satisfactory church' but an aesthetically pleasing edifice. In June 1898, Ebenezer Rees, writing in the Cardigan and Tivy Side Advertiser, declared that 'Llandygwydd Church is one of the most beautiful in the whole of Tivyside surrounded by a churchyard in which Gray would have loved to pen his elegy'. The church that was designed by R. J. Withers and constructed dur- ing the mid-1850s was the third or fourth stone church to have stood within the churchyard at Llandygwydd. By today the building, which was a prom- inent feature of the village's physical identity, has been demolished and ren- dered a safe ruin. Few traces remain of what appeared, on its completion in 1857, a seemingly indestructible edifice capped by a not unattractive spire. Within fifty years of its construction however, parishioners were expressing their concerns about the safety of both spire and tower. In 1913 the spire was pulled down: in 1979, the Parochial Church Council decided that the tower should be demolished. The remaining building was closed as a place of wor- ship in July 1997 and it was demolished in the autumn of 2000. 'Yr Hen Ysgol Fach' (the little old school), once the infant schoolroom of Llandygwydd voluntary primary school adjoining the churchyard, has been converted into a church and appears adequate for the needs of the small con- gregation of regularly worshipping Anglicans in the parish. It was consecrat- ed for divine worship in March 1998. It is impossible to give a precise date for the construction of the first stone church in Llandygwydd, though undoubtedly one had been built some-