St Mihangel's Church

St Mihangel's Church in the village of Llanfihangel yn Nhowyn, on Anglesey in north Wales, has one of the most unusual modern histories of any Welsh church: a Victorian village church that became the station chapel of RAF Valley — and was enlarged by the wholesale dismantling and reassembly of another Anglesey church at its west end. It stands in a gated, walled churchyard beside the road, about five miles from the port of Holyhead, and gives the village its name: llan, the Welsh for "enclosure" and then "church", joined to a softened form of Mihangel — St Michael.

The date of the first church on the site is unknown, though the antiquarian Angharad Llwyd, writing in 1833, described an "ancient and venerable structure" forming "a conspicuous and interesting object for many miles round". Harry Longueville Jones, surveying in 1847, found a small building of early Perpendicular character — forty-six feet long and only nine feet high — with a "peculiar" east window incorporating a shield-shaped light perhaps meant to display a coat of arms. In 1862 the church was largely rebuilt by Henry Kennedy, architect of the Diocese of Bangor and restorer of churches across Anglesey, who reused some of the older fabric, especially at the east end. Cadw, in listing the church Grade II in 1971, judged it "a good example of a mid 19th-century church" whose simple design complements "the local late medieval idiom typical of the island".

The extraordinary chapter came late in the twentieth century. After the Church in Wales ceased holding services, the building found a new role in 1998 as the chapel for nearby RAF Valley, the Royal Air Force's fast-jet training station. To give the congregation more room, a remarkable piece of architectural recycling had already been carried out in 1988: the disused church of St Enghenedl at Llanynghenedl was taken down stone by stone and "faithfully reassembled" at the west end of St Mihangel's by the Department of the Environment's Property Services Agency — with its orientation reversed, so that St Enghenedl's old east end now faces west. The two churches-in-one are joined by an arcade of three round arches, the bellcote sitting on the roof ridge at the seam between them; the Victorian portion is slightly wider and higher than its transplanted partner, and each part has its own entrance.

The interior tells the RAF's story in glass. In 2010 a two-panel stained glass window was dedicated by the RAF's Chaplain-in-Chief, Ray Pentland, depicting the work of the Search and Rescue units based at RAF Valley — whose yellow Sea Kings rescued hundreds from the mountains and seas of north Wales — together with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and the RAF Mountain Rescue Service. It was created by Karen Newby, wife of a former station commander, with Lindsey Abbott; Newby had earlier designed a window of 2001 marking the work of 208 Squadron, and another window followed in 2012 for the centenary of 4 Squadron. Most other windows hold clear leaded glass within the Victorian trefoil-headed frames.

Older relics persist among the squadron glass. A seventeenth-century gravestone is set into the floor before the sanctuary; a 1937 Royal Commission survey noted a rectangular gritstone font of unknown date and a memorial to Sion Evan and his son Evan Jones, who died in 1790 and 1822; and a 1906 survey of diocesan plate recorded communion vessels of Britannia metal and electro-plate — the old silver service having been stolen. Thus St Mihangel's carries on, a Grade II listed hybrid of two villages' churches, where the prayers of medieval Anglesey are continued by the aircrew of one of Britain's busiest air stations.