The Llananno Screen

St Anno's is a small plain church beside the A483 in the Ithon valley, easy to drive past, and it contains one of the great works of medieval art in Wales.

The screen

A rood screen and loft of the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, running the full width of the church, in oak.

The carving is extraordinarily dense: tracery, vine trails, foliage, and a row of twenty-five niches along the loft front holding figures of prophets and apostles with Christ at the centre. The detail rewards standing in front of it for a long time, and a torch helps because it sits in shadow for most of the day.

It belongs to what is usually called the Newtown school of carvers, a group of workshops working in mid Wales and the Marches around 1500. Llanwnnog, Llanbister, Partrishow and Old Radnor all have work of the same tradition, and the concentration of surviving screens in this district is not matched anywhere else in Britain.

The figures in the loft niches are generally taken to be Victorian replacements.

Why it survived

Two rounds of luck.

First the Reformation. Rood screens were the target of specific iconoclasm — the rood itself, the crucifix above the loft, was almost universally destroyed, and many screens went with it. In poor remote parishes the loft was often simply left, because removing it cost money nobody had.

Then the Victorians. The church was rebuilt in 1876 and 1877, which usually meant a screen was discarded as clutter. Here it was taken down carefully and put back into the new building.

That decision, by whoever made it, is the reason this exists.

Why here

The screens of Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire are a fifteenth-century phenomenon, and they follow the rebuilding boom that came after the Glyndŵr revolt, when the country settled and Welsh freeholders had money to spend on their parish churches.

The same period produced the timber houses that give Radnorshire its extraordinary domestic building stock. The screens and the houses are the same wealth, the same carpenters and very often the same decade.

Visiting

Free, normally open, no facilities, limited parking on the verge. It is a working church.

Llanbister is three miles north and has a church entered through the tower and another good screen. Llanwnnog, near Caersws, has the third of the group. Doing all three in a day is one of the better small expeditions in Powys.