Old Church of St Nidan, Llanidan

The Old Church of St Nidan stands in the community of Llanidan, on the Isle of Anglesey in North Wales, close to the shore of the Menai Strait. A medieval church now partly ruined and no longer in regular use, it is nonetheless a building of great antiquity and charm, with origins reaching back to the age of the Welsh saints. A Grade II* listed building, regarded as a fine example of a simple medieval rural church enriched by later additions, St Nidan's preserves both a remarkable history and one of the most curious legends attached to any church in Wales.

The first church on the site was established in the seventh century by St Nidan, who served as the confessor of the early monastery at Penmon on Anglesey — one of the great centres of Celtic Christianity in the region. The place-name Llanidan itself means "the church enclosure of Nidan", recording his foundation. The oldest parts of the present structure, however, date from the fourteenth century, and around the year 1500 the church was considerably enlarged by the addition of a second nave on the north side, separated from the earlier nave by an arcade of six fine arches. In its medieval heyday St Nidan's was, in the words of the nineteenth-century antiquarian Harry Longueville Jones, one of the largest and most important churches on the island of Anglesey.

The church's decline came in the nineteenth century. Between 1839 and 1843 a new church was built nearby to serve the local community, partly because of the great cost of repairing the ageing old church. After the new church opened, much of the old building was demolished, leaving only part of the western end and the central arcade standing. The decision was condemned at the time by Harry Longueville Jones, a clergyman and antiquarian, who lamented the "melancholy fate" of so important a building, and the partial destruction of the church has been regretted by many since. For a time the surviving portion was used as a chapel for funerals.

St Nidan's is also rich in legend and relics. In the twelfth century the chronicler Gerald of Wales recorded a curious tradition: the church was said to possess a stone carving, shaped somewhat like a human thigh, which would always return to the church by the next day, no matter how far away it was taken. A Norman earl, the story went, once had the stone chained to a great rock and thrown into the sea, only for it to find its way back to the church by the following morning. In more recent times a sandstone chest containing fragments of bone — possibly the relics of a saint — was discovered buried beneath the altar; the chest, together with the church's thirteenth-century font, was moved to the new church when the old one was abandoned.

Today the surviving remains of the Old Church of St Nidan have been restored by the owners of the adjoining house, Plas Llanidan, and the building is occasionally opened to the public. Though it is no longer a place of regular worship, it stands as an evocative and beautiful relic of medieval Anglesey — a fragment of one of the island's most important churches, set in a peaceful and ancient landscape by the Menai Strait. Its Grade II* listing recognises its special architectural and historic interest.

The church stands in the rural community of Llanidan, in the south of Anglesey, close to the Menai Strait that separates the island from the mainland of North Wales. Nearby are the elegant Menai Suspension Bridge and the Britannia Bridge that carry road and rail across the strait, the great houses and gardens of Plas Newydd, the village with the famously long name of Llanfairpwllgwyngyll, the town of Caernarfon with its mighty castle across the water, and the mountains of Snowdonia (Eryri) rising beyond, all within easy reach.

From its foundation by St Nidan in the seventh century, through the building of the medieval church in the fourteenth century and its enlargement around 1500, the legend of the returning stone recorded by Gerald of Wales, and the partial demolition that followed the building of the new church in the 1840s, the Old Church of St Nidan gathers many centuries of the history of Anglesey into its surviving walls. A Grade II* listed medieval church near the Menai Strait, lovingly preserved as a romantic ruin, it remains a precious survival of the age of the Welsh saints — one of the most atmospheric ancient churches on the island of Anglesey.