Village · upper Usk

Defynnog

A Roman inscribed stone, an ogham inscription and a churchyard yew that somebody claimed was five thousand years old. Two of those three are beyond argument.

Defynnog is a small village on the upper Usk a mile west of Sennybridge, and its church is one of the more rewarding in southern Powys for anyone interested in the early medieval period.

The stones

Built into the fabric of St Cynog's church are two inscribed stones that between them span the transition from Roman Britain to early medieval Wales.

One carries a Latin inscription of the fifth or sixth century, of the type found across western Britain in the generations after Rome withdrew — a personal name, in Roman letters, on a memorial stone set up by people who were no longer part of an empire but still using its alphabet and its formulae.

The other carries ogham, the Irish alphabet of notches cut along the edge of a stone. Ogham inscriptions in Wales cluster in the south-west and are evidence of Irish settlement and influence in the fifth and sixth centuries. Finding one this far east is notable.

Both were reused as building material, which is how the great majority of early inscribed stones in Wales survived: somebody put them in a wall and forgot about them.

The yew

The churchyard holds an enormous yew, and it has been the subject of a good deal of noise.

Accounts differThe claim attracted very wide coverage and considerable scepticism from dendrologists. Yews are exceptionally difficult to date because the heartwood decays and ring counts are impossible on hollow trunks, and estimates rest on girth and growth-rate assumptions that are unreliable at extreme ages. The tree is undoubtedly ancient and probably well over a thousand years. The higher figure is contested and should not be repeated as fact.

What is not in doubt is that a very old yew in a churchyard is itself evidence. Yews were frequently planted at or before the foundation of early Welsh church sites, and a tree substantially older than any building on the site tells you the ground was in use before the church was.

The church

Dedicated to Cynog, said to be a son of Brychan and one of the more widely commemorated saints of Brycheiniog. There is a good font and a Norman core beneath later work.

Around

Sennybridge is a mile east, with its castle ruin and its army camp. Mynydd Epynt, cleared in 1940, rises to the north.

South is Fforest Fawr and the waterfall country, and the road over to Ystradfellte passes Maen Llia, a Bronze Age standing stone over three metres high in an otherwise empty pass, which is one of the more striking prehistoric monuments in the county.

Sources

Cadw, Cof Cymru designation record for St Cynog's Church, Defynnog.
Edwards, N., A Corpus of Early Medieval Inscribed Stones and Stone Sculpture in Wales, Vol. III, 2013.
Coflein (RCAHMW), records for the Defynnog stones.
Ancient Yew Group, published survey records.