Abbey Cwmhir

The Cistercians looked for places nobody else wanted, and they found one here: a long narrow valley in the middle of Radnorshire with a stream, good grazing above and no neighbours.

The abbey was founded in 1176 under the patronage of Cadwallon ap Madog, a Welsh lord of Maelienydd, and it was Welsh-patronised throughout, which mattered politically as much as economically.

The nave that was not finished

The monks set out a church with a nave of fourteen bays. That is longer than any other church in Wales, longer than most English cathedrals of the period, and it was never completed.

Why is not certain. The abbey was on a frontier that changed hands repeatedly, its patrons were Welsh lords whose fortunes fluctuated violently, and the community appears never to have been large enough to fill what it had planned. The scale looks like ambition running ahead of resources by a considerable margin.

What survives is foundations, pegged out in mown grass, and the outline of that immense nave is the whole point of the visit. Standing at the west end and looking east gives you a better sense of Cistercian ambition than most complete buildings do.

Llywelyn

Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, killed near Builth in December 1282, is traditionally said to have been buried here.

A granite slab was placed on the site in 1978 and it has become a place of pilgrimage. Flowers appear on it, particularly in December.

Afterwards

Glyndŵr's forces are said to have damaged the abbey in the early 1400s, and it never recovered. It was dissolved in the 1530s with a very small community.

The stone was dispersed, as monastic stone always was. The nave arcade in St Idloes church at Llanidloes came from here, which is worth seeing precisely because it lets you look at what the abbey's masonry actually was. Other fragments went into the parish church and into local buildings.

Visiting

Open, free, unstaffed, in the village of Abbeycwmhir north-east of Rhayader. There is an interpretation panel and a great deal of grass.

The village church of St Mary was built in 1680 and rebuilt in 1866 and holds some abbey material. Abbey-Cwmhir Hall nearby is Victorian Gothic and privately owned, with occasional openings.

It is a quiet place and out of the way, which is more or less what the founders were after.