Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant

In 1588 the vicar of this parish published a complete translation of the Bible into Welsh, and the language survived as a written medium because of it.

That is not an overstatement. Welsh in the sixteenth century had lost its aristocratic patrons, had no official status, and had every prospect of following Cornish. What Morgan produced was a text of extraordinary quality that every parish church in Wales was legally required to hold, read aloud weekly for three hundred years, and against which all subsequent Welsh prose was measured.

Morgan

William Morgan was born at Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant in the Conwy valley around 1545, educated at Cambridge, and came to Llanrhaeadr as vicar in 1578. He worked on the translation here for most of a decade, in a remote upland parish, while conducting a long and vicious legal feud with a local gentleman that at one point involved armed men and an attempt on his life.

He was translating from Hebrew and Greek, not from English, which matters. He also had the New Testament translation by William Salesbury of 1567 to work from and improved on it considerably, particularly in readability.

He went to London to see it through the press in 1587 and 1588. He later became Bishop of Llandaff and then of St Asaph, where he is buried.

What is there

The parish church of St Dogfan, medieval with substantial Victorian restoration, with a memorial to Morgan. The rectory where he worked is gone.

The village itself is a Tanat valley settlement of stone houses along a street, with the Berwyn rising behind it.

There is no visitor centre and no great fuss made. Morgan's birthplace at Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant, in Gwynedd, is a National Trust property and gets the attention; the place he actually did the work does not.

Pistyll Rhaeadr

Four miles up the valley from the village is the highest single-drop waterfall in Wales, around 240 feet, falling in two stages with a natural rock arch at the bottom that local tradition calls the Fairy Bridge.

It is one of the traditional Seven Wonders of Wales, which is a Victorian doggerel list rather than anything older, and it is genuinely spectacular after rain.

There is a car park, a café and a charge for parking. The lane up is narrow and long and not a place to meet a tractor at speed.

Mochnant

The commote name in the village's full title distinguishes it from the several other Llanrhaeadrs in Wales. Mochnant was divided in 1166 between Powys Fadog and Powys Wenwynwyn, and the boundary ran through this parish, which is why the village was historically split between two counties until the nineteenth century.