Pennant Melangell

Drive up the Tanat to Llangynog, turn west, and follow a single-track lane for two miles until it stops. There is a church, a farm, some very old yews and a great deal of quiet.

The shrine

Inside the church is a stone structure on short columns with a steeply gabled top, decorated with chevron and other Romanesque ornament. It is a reliquary shrine of the twelfth century, built to hold the bones of the saint and to allow pilgrims to pass beneath or beside them.

It is the earliest surviving Romanesque shrine of its kind in northern Europe.

It survives by accident. At the Reformation it was dismantled, and the stones were built into the church fabric and the churchyard wall, where they sat for four centuries. They were identified, recovered and reassembled in stages through the twentieth century, with the final restoration completed in 1989 following excavation.

That excavation found burials beneath the church, including one in a position consistent with the shrine's original location.

The legend

Melangell is said to have been an Irish princess who fled an arranged marriage to live as a hermit in this valley, and to have sheltered a hare from the hounds of Brochwel, prince of Powys, whereupon the dogs would not advance and the huntsman's horn stuck to his lips. Brochwel granted her the valley as a perpetual sanctuary.

Hares are carved on the fifteenth-century rood screen in the church, so the association is at least that old in local practice.

The setting

The churchyard is roughly circular, which is the signature of an early Welsh church enclosure, and it contains yews that are very old indeed.

The valley is a cul-de-sac under the Berwyn, and the position — remote, enclosed, at the head of everything — is precisely what an early hermitage site looks like across Wales and Ireland.

Now

It functions as a church and as a place of pilgrimage, with a small centre offering quiet space and support for people who are ill or bereaved. That is a continuation rather than a revival; Melangell's shrine was a healing site for centuries.

It is one of very few places in Powys that people still visit for the reason it was built.

Visiting

Open, free, unstaffed. The lane from Llangynog is narrow with passing places and is not a place to be in a hurry.

Please treat it as a working church and a place of retreat rather than as a monument. Llangynog is two miles back down the valley and has a pub.