Church Of St. Aelhaiarn

St Aelhaiarn's Church is the parish church of Guilsfield, a village in Powys, three miles north of Welshpool in the old county of Montgomeryshire, in the eastern Welsh borderland. A Grade I listed building set in a large oval churchyard ringed with ancient yews, it is one of the finest medieval churches of mid-Wales, crowned by a magnificent Late Perpendicular ceiling and dedicated to an early Welsh saint whose name reaches back to the very dawn of Christianity in the region. An active parish church in the Diocese of St Asaph of the Church in Wales, St Aelhaiarn's gathers the long religious history of the Welsh Marches — Celtic saint, medieval craftsmanship, Victorian restoration and a churchyard older than the church itself — into one building at the heart of its village.

The dedication is the church's deepest root. Aelhaiarn was a Welsh saint of the late sixth or early seventh century, one of the company of holy men who carried Christianity through Wales in the age after the Romans, and a church bearing his name implies a place of Christian worship at Guilsfield from very early times. The form of the churchyard supports that antiquity: it is large and oval, the classic shape of an early Welsh llan, an enclosed sacred site that often long predates the stone church standing within it, and it holds a group of ancient yew trees — trees that in Wales frequently mark sites of pre-Norman Christian use. So important is this setting that the churchyard is designated at Grade II* on the Cadw/ICOMOS Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, a recognition that the ground around the church is itself a monument.

The present building dates mainly from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, though parts may be older, and the precise dating of its origins has long been debated by the experts. Cadw's listing ascribes the tower to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries; Robert Scourfield and Richard Haslam, in the Powys volume of the Buildings of Wales series, date it to around 1300; and the Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, which surveyed the church in the 1990s, judges it predominantly fifteenth-century with possibly earlier origins. What is clear is that a substantial church grew up here in the later Middle Ages, built mainly of local sandstone, with a nave and chancel, an attached western tower, a two-storey south porch and north and south aisles.

Between 1877 and 1879 the church was thoroughly restored by George Edmund Street, one of the greatest architects of the Gothic Revival and the designer of the Royal Courts of Justice in London, at a cost of £6,000 — a very large sum — funded by Christ Church, Oxford, then the patron of the living, and by the Mytton family, local landowners. The verdicts on Street's work vary, as they often do with Victorian restorations of medieval churches. The Church in Wales historic record considers that he worked "sympathetically", and Scourfield and Haslam judge that he created an interior that is "successfully homogeneous"; the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, however, notes more critically that "many of the original features of the building were swept away" in the process. Both things can be true: Street gave Guilsfield a coherent and dignified Victorian interior, but at the cost of some of its medieval detail — the recurring dilemma of nineteenth-century church restoration.

What survived, and what makes St Aelhaiarn's exceptional, is its roof. Scourfield and Haslam single out the "very fine Late Perpendicular ceiling", whose bosses are decorated with Tudor motifs — circles, triangles and quatrefoils — a richly carved canopy of timber that ranks among the best medieval church ceilings in this part of Wales. Beneath it the church keeps other treasures of its long history: a font thought to be of the twelfth century, a survivor of the building's earliest phase, and stained glass of the 1890s by Heaton, Butler and Bayne, one of the leading firms of late Victorian church glass. The fabric is protected at the highest level, listed Grade I, with the churchyard wall and gates listed Grade II in their own right, and even one of the churchyard's tombs singled out for protection: a table tomb near the south gates honouring "Richard Jones, gent., who was interred December ye 10th 1707 aged 90", itself a Grade II listed structure — a reminder of the generations of villagers who have been laid to rest within the old oval enclosure.

The setting completes the picture. Guilsfield lies in the gentle hill country of eastern Montgomeryshire, in the broad valley of the upper Severn, three miles north of the market town of Welshpool with its great house and gardens at Powis Castle. St Aelhaiarn's stands at the centre of the village, its tower rising above the ancient yews, its churchyard a green island of deep history in the heart of the community. From an early Welsh saint's llan, through a medieval church with one of the region's finest roofs, a twelfth-century font and a careful but heavy-handed Victorian restoration, St Aelhaiarn's holds well over a thousand years of the religious life of the Welsh borders within its walls and its yew-circled churchyard. It remains a living parish church of the Church in Wales, where regular services are still held — a Grade I monument that is also, and above all, the working church of Guilsfield.