St Ceinwen's Church, Cerrigceinwen

St Ceinwen's Church at Cerrigceinwen sits in a hollow at the side of a country road in the very middle of Anglesey, about two miles south-west of Llangefni, the county town. A former parish church of the Church in Wales, Grade II listed, it is a Victorian rebuilding of 1860 on a site where worship has been offered for well over a thousand years — and its doorway, remarkably, is framed with carved gravestones centuries older than the walls around them.

The date of the first church here is uncertain. A 2006 guide to Anglesey's churches says worship began in the seventh century, while the nineteenth-century writer Samuel Lewis recorded a tradition that a church was founded on the site as early as 450. The dedication is to St Ceinwen, an early Celtic female saint known elsewhere in Wales and in Cornwall as Cain or Keyne — in Welsh, Cain means "fair" or "beautiful", and Ceinwen "Blessed Cain". She was a daughter of King Brychan Brycheiniog, and her siblings are honoured on Anglesey too: St Dwynwen, the Welsh patron of lovers, at Llanddwyn, and St Dyfnan at Llanddyfnan. In the south of the churchyard rises a spring known as St Ceinwen's Well, which the clergyman-antiquarian Harry Longueville Jones noted was "once much resorted to as a spring that could cure many diseases."

A medieval church of unknown date stood here and was repaired in 1839 — the antiquarian Angharad Llwyd had described it before that work as "a neat small edifice, and appropriately fitted-up", and Longueville Jones, writing in 1846, praised its east window as "one of the purest models, as to proportion and workmanship" in Anglesey. The present building was erected in 1860 by Henry Kennedy, architect of the Diocese of Bangor, with Frederick Rogers. It is a simple rural church in the Decorated style, of rubble masonry dressed with freestone under a slate roof edged with stone: a nave of about forty feet by twenty-one, a shorter and narrower chancel, a south porch, a vestry on the north side, and a large bellcote with a single bell at the west end. The windows are pointed arches with trefoil-headed lights, glazed with coloured leaded glass rather than pictorial stained glass; inside, three steps climb from nave to chancel through a decorated chancel arch, with two more up to the sanctuary, beneath an exposed timber roof.

What makes the church special — and earned Cadw's particular note that it is "particularly notable for retention of early carved stonework in the later fabric" — is its reuse of ancient monuments. The arched doorway in the porch incorporates two old carved gravestones: the lintel is a twelfth-century stone cut at its head with a circle containing a rough cross of petals and a decorated key design on the shaft, while set to the right of the door is part of a gravestone of the ninth to eleventh centuries bearing a cross in a circle. The circular stone font is twelfth-century too, set on a modern base, with five panels — four carved with interlacing crosses and knots, the fifth left blank — whose "richly sculptured compartments" Longueville Jones admired.

The memorials span the parish's later history: a stone on the west wall to the Reverend William Griffith, who died in 1752; an inscribed stone on the north wall commemorating Morris Lloyd (or Llwyd), a Royalist killed by Cromwell's troops in 1647; and a First World War memorial on the south wall, with a Commonwealth war grave of a Royal Army Medical Corps sergeant of the Second World War in the churchyard. A 1906 survey of church plate in the Bangor diocese recorded a chalice and paten of 1823, and noted that a pewter flagon owned by the church from 1739 to 1834 had been lost.

St Ceinwen's was listed Grade II on 30 January 1968 as "a simple rural church of the 19th century". It is no longer used for worship by the Church in Wales, and as of July 2012 was offered for sale at £65,000, with some surrounding land but not the graveyards to front and rear — the resting places of the parish remaining, as they have always been, beside St Ceinwen's healing well and the stones of her ancient dead.