St Cwyllog's Church, Llangwyllog

St Cwyllog's Church, Llangwyllog, is a medieval church in the rural heart of Anglesey, north Wales, about three miles north-west of the county town of Llangefni and a short distance from the small village of Llangwyllog — which takes its name from the church, llan being the Welsh word that meant first "enclosure" and then "church", with "-gwyllog" a modified form of the saint's name. A Grade II* listed building, it preserves what one guide calls "the earliest and finest of several pre-ecclesiological church interiors in Anglesey" — including a rare Georgian three-decker pulpit of 1769 — and a chalice lid that came home after centuries away, mistaken for a Tudor sugar lid.

The first church on this site was established in the sixth century by Cwyllog, a female saint — one of the daughters of St Caw, the king in northern Britain who lost his lands and sought safety with his family in Anglesey, where the ruler Maelgwn Gwynedd gave him land. (Her siblings founded churches across the island, including St Gildas the chronicler.) A church here was recorded at the Norwich Taxation of 1254, and the present walls may date from around 1200. In the thirteenth century the church came under the control of the Augustinian canons of Penmon Priory on eastern Anglesey, who took the income from its tithes; as the priory dwindled, in 1522 the prior and two canons — by then the entire community — signed the lease of Llangwyllog church to Richard Bulkeley of the prominent Beaumaris family, for a hundred years at an annual rent of £1. The north doorway and east window are late fifteenth-century, and in the latter half of the sixteenth century an unusual annexe was added at the west end — possibly intended as a schoolroom, a feature Cadw notes as unusual for Anglesey. Restoration was funded in 1812 by Thomas Bulkeley, 7th Viscount Bulkeley, with further "tactful" work in 1854.

The church is built of rubble masonry with very large boulder quoins, under a slate roof with stone copings. The main body measures 45 feet 6 inches by 15 feet 3 inches, with no structural division between nave and chancel; the lower, smaller west annexe, built in line with it, measures 20 feet 6 inches by 15 feet 6 inches, with a sixteenth-century west doorway converted to a window in the nineteenth century, a modern east door — and an eighteenth-century fireplace, befitting its schoolroom past. At the west end of the nave roof is a bellcote with a single bell of 1661, decorated with three bull heads; a cross marks the east gable. The main entrance, on the north of the nave, is a late fifteenth-century pointed doorway in a square frame. The fifteenth-century east window has three trefoil-headed lights in a pointed arch, with stained glass added in 1882 by the Pre-Raphaelite artist Henry Holiday; the north windows are late sixteenth-century with square heads, matched on the south by one original and two nineteenth-century copies.

The interior is the treasure. The cylindrical stone font of the thirteenth century is carved with an elaborate leaf design and knotwork pattern — about a third of the decoration left unfinished, the medieval carver's work frozen mid-task. The rest of the fittings date largely from the refurbishment of 1769: the triple-decker pulpit combined with reading desk, panelled on front, sides and back, inscribed "M T I I WARDENS 1769" — among the rarest of Georgian survivals — with communion rails on three sides of the altar, probably contemporary, seats along the chancel walls, an eighteenth-century box pew east of the pulpit (a nineteenth-century one beside it), open benches to the west, a church chest dated 1804, various eighteenth-century memorials, and hat pegs still on the walls: the complete furniture of Georgian rural worship, untouched by Victorian ecclesiology.

The church owns three sixteenth-century silver chalices — and the story of one of them is a small miracle of serendipity. The lid of a chalice dated 1578 was returned to the church in 2010 by an antiques dealer who had bought it years before, believing it to be a Tudor sugar lid. Investigation showed it had belonged to a nearby closed church whose silver had been transferred to St Cwyllog's; a chance conversation between the dealer and a local clergyman at an archaeology group revealed that the lid bore the same silversmith's mark — and fitted one of St Cwyllog's chalices exactly. The dealer decided it ought to go home.

St Cwyllog's was listed Grade II* on 12 May 1970 as "a good rural medieval church which retains some C15 features and the original simple medieval plan", with Cadw noting the eighteenth-century fittings and the unusual west annexe. The nineteenth-century antiquarian Angharad Llwyd called it "small, but remarkably well built", praising the "ancient and curious chapel at the west end of the nave"; Harry Longueville Jones wrote in 1859 that it had "rather better architectural features about it than most of the small churches in Anglesey". Still in use by the Church in Wales — one of seven churches in a combined group of parishes within the deanery of Malltraeth, the archdeaconry of Bangor and the Diocese of Bangor, with services in recent years on the third Sunday afternoon of each month — the daughter of King Caw keeps her fourteen-century-old llan in the middle of the island, three-decker pulpit, unfinished font and homecoming silver intact.