Village · Radnor Forest edge

Bleddfa

A church with a tower that was begun and never finished, in a parish that has been shrinking since the fourteenth century.

Bleddfa is a handful of buildings on the road between Knighton and New Radnor, under the northern edge of Radnor Forest, and its church has an oddity that is worth stopping for.

The tower

The church of St Mary Magdalene has a tower base that is far too large for the building it belongs to, and it stops abruptly.

The usual reading is that an ambitious tower was begun and abandoned, and that the base was subsequently roofed over as it stood.

Accounts differBoth explanations appear in the published accounts and the fabric has been read both ways. What is clear is that the present arrangement is not what was intended, and that the parish's capacity to finish it ran out.

Either way the effect is the same and it tells the same story: a fourteenth or fifteenth-century parish with the ambition to build something substantial and, before long, without the resources to complete or maintain it.

The interior has a fine roof and a simple, very old feel. Excavation in the church in the 1970s found earlier structures beneath it.

The parish

Dispersed, as almost all Radnorshire parishes are. There is no village in the English sense — a church, a few houses, an inn, and farms scattered across several square miles of hill.

That is the older settlement pattern and it survived here because nothing ever came along to change it. No planted borough, no industry, no railway.

There is a castle mound near the church, one of the many small earthwork castles of Maelienydd, the commote fought over between the Mortimers and the Welsh for two centuries.

The Bleddfa Centre

Since the 1970s the old school and adjoining buildings have housed an arts and study centre, running exhibitions, concerts and retreats.

It is an unlikely thing to find in a Radnorshire hamlet and it has kept going for fifty years, which in a parish of two hundred people is worth noting.

Around

Knighton is six miles north-east, New Radnor five miles south-west, and Radnor Forest rises immediately to the south — a block of high ground with no settlement on it that pushes everything in this county round its edges.

Water-break-its-neck, a waterfall in a wooded gorge on the far side of the Forest, is the nearest thing to a tourist attraction for some distance.

Sources

Cadw, Cof Cymru designation record for St Mary Magdalene's Church, Bleddfa.
Coflein (RCAHMW), records for Bleddfa church and castle mound.
Haslam, R., The Buildings of Wales: Powys, 1979.
Transactions of the Radnorshire Society, on Bleddfa parish.