St Michael's Church, Llanfihangel Ysgeifiog

St Michael's Church, Llanfihangel Ysgeifiog, is a former parish church in the countryside of Anglesey, north Wales, now closed and standing partly in ruins. Dating from the fifteenth century, with a chapel added in the seventeenth, it was abandoned when a new church was built elsewhere in the parish in 1847, and today only its chancel and north chapel survive. A Grade II listed building, it is valued precisely because it escaped Victorian rebuilding — an important survival of unrestored late-medieval work.

The church stands in its churchyard about a mile from the village of Gaerwen, reached by a footpath from the nearest road. The place gave its name to the surrounding area: the Welsh llan, originally meaning "enclosure" and then "church," is joined to a modified form of Michael, the saint to whom it is dedicated. The present structure dates from the fifteenth century and was extended in 1638 when a local family added a chapel on the north side. In the 1840s, however, the centre of population shifted with coal mining at Pentre Berw and the building of Thomas Telford's London-to-Holyhead road across Anglesey, and a decision was taken to build a new church on a more convenient site. St Michael's, Gaerwen, opened in 1847, and the old church closed. By 1865, when the church historian Sir Stephen Glynne visited, only the chancel and north chapel remained, a new wall having been built where the chancel once joined the demolished nave. In the twenty-first century some restoration has been carried out with help from the Welsh Government and Cadw, and services are occasionally held once more.

The church had its share of notable clergy. By 1535 the rectory of St Michael's and the vicarage of St Ffinan's were combined and held by the Dean of Bangor to augment the dean's income, and those associated with the church include the antiquarian priest John Jones — known as "Llef o'r Nant" — who was curate from 1809 to 1815, and Evan Lewis, curate in 1845–46 and later himself Dean of Bangor.

All that now remains is the chancel and the north chapel, built of rubble masonry dressed with sandstone; the nave, south chapel and roof have gone. Entry is through a doorway at the west end of the chancel that reuses a fifteenth-century pointed arch, and the south wall still shows where a chapel once stood. The three-light east window dates from the late sixteenth century, with an inscribed stone above recording the date 1598, while an inscription over the north chapel's window records its construction in 1638. When the antiquarian Harry Longueville Jones visited in 1845, before the closure, the church was still some sixty-eight feet long internally, with a south chapel separated from the nave by five rotting wooden columns, a south porch, and a bench inscribed "T. M. 1684." He noted gravestones by the altar that appeared to mark the burials of priests, and a 1937 survey dated one of them to the eleventh or twelfth century; a still older gravestone fragment, of the ninth to eleventh century, had been built into the bellcote.

The antiquarians who saw St Michael's left vivid impressions. Angharad Llwyd in 1833 called it "a spacious and ancient structure" and admired the "ancient stained glass" of brilliant colour in its east window; Longueville Jones in 1845 thought it "greatly dilapidated" yet "one of the most interesting in the island," with a north doorway of "singularly elegant though mutilated details"; and Glynne in 1865 found it abandoned and "a wretched scene of decay," though still admiring the mouldings of the chancel doorway. When the old church closed, its bell, plate and the "T. M. 1684" benches were moved to the new church at Gaerwen. Listed at Grade II in 1968, and described by a modern guide as standing in "a lonely spot" but "well worth a visit," this quiet Anglesey ruin preserves, in its weathered chancel and chapel, the genuine fabric of a late-medieval Welsh church.