Grongar Hill II

   After lunch we ascended to the parish church, dedicated to St Cathen, to find where Piper had sat and sketched Grongar Hill and Paxton's Tower. The area wasn't that had to find at all - at the bottom of the churchyard or perhaps in the pasture below.  Though looking at my photo now, I think, I was a little too far the north to be entirely accurate.

     The church itself is rather typically Late Medieval Welsh.  A tall unbuttressed tower with small bell openings, built of rubble and perhaps once plastered and limewashed.  The rest of the church in contrast is rather low slung.  The detailing is very simple.  The south chancel chapel is post medieval, built in the early 1600s.  John Dyer's memorial is on the exterior. The graveyard is its usual quota of Victorian polished red- granite memorials. Quite atmospheric in places.

     Inside it is more spacious than expected - much broader rather than it is tall.  Each nave and the south aisle, which must be as wide, are covered with wooden barrel vaults. To the north of the nave is a tall transept separated from the nave by a round arch. In all I was reminded of the architecture of an another two peripheral areas of the Late Gothic World: Cornwall and Scotland.  And then quite unexpectedly in the south chancel chapel a large, extravagant Jacobean memorial to Bishop Rudd of St David's who preferred to be buried here in his home parish (his family then owned Aberglasney) rather than in the cathedral. (The chapel was constructed to take the tomb - though the east window is now Victorian.) Plain now but surely it must have once of been bright with paint? Relatively free of clutter, the church is unhappily much darkened by a Victorian restoration, and by the lack of windows in the s chancel chapel, though judging by the hood mould on the exterior there must once have been a 'gothic survival' window of some description.  Gothic survival too, apparently, is the well detailed arcade between the chapel and the chancel.  A real contrast to the crudely designed nave arcade.

   Really there was nothing now to do but visit Paxton's Tower and its great views up the Towy Valley to the Black Mountain and Brecon Beacons.  The tower, a monument to Lord Nelson, was constructed by Sir William Paxton in 1811.  It was originally lavishly furnished but the windows are now open to the elements.  It is currently owned by the National Trust.