St Mary's Church, Chapel Hill

Cadw's description

Summary description and reason for designation

The monument comprises the ruined parish church of St Mary’s. It is located within a sub-rectangular graveyard on steep wooded slopes on the south side of the lower Wye Valley overlooking Tintern Abbey. It was mostly rebuilt by John Prichard, Diocese of Llandaff architect, during 1865-8 and incorporates medieval walling and reset features. St Mary’s became a property of the abbey, and its Welsh name (Llanandras) suggests it stood on an earlier pre-Norman site.

It consists of an undivided nave and chancel measuring on average 18.9m in length and 7.6m in width, entered by a porch tower at the west end of the north wall. The porch tower measures 4.5m in length and 3.5m in width. The walls are of roughly coursed limestone rubble with Bath Stone dressings and blocks of local sandstone reused from the earlier building and possibly the abbey. The battered bases and less regularly coursed lower portions of the east, west and north walls retain medieval fabric. The north and south and walls of the nave and are lit by nineteenth century single-light windows with pointed heads, probably modelled on the eastern window of the north wall, which is a reset medieval piece in Devonian sandstone. The east and west windows retain Decorated tracery, depicted in early drawings but mostly restored in the 1860s with a creamy limestone; the east window retained early sandstone work in its lower half until a collapse caused by a storm in January 2026. The south wall was rebuilt by Prichard, who added a projecting chapel and narrower adjacent vestry with a corner fireplace to the south of the chancel. This L-shaped block measures 8.5m by 5m with a square coal cellar accessible from an external door below its western half. The chapel is separated from the main body of the church by a full height segmental headed arch, the adjacent entrance to the vestry being a modest flat-headed doorway. The division between the two rooms is lost. Prichard’s tower replaced a two-storey porch shown on pre-restoration drawings but reflects the form of the earlier structure with a reset sandstone statue niche above a flat-lintelled doorway. It is of four upper stages and retains its stone tiled saddleback roof and wooden floors. The belfry is lit with paired trefoil windows with simple lancets above. The nave doorway has a crude trefoil hoodmould, possibly repurposed, above a segmental-headed arch set on corbels, all in local sandstone. Immediately to the west of this is a nineteenth century water stoup. Internally, sections of diagonally set red and black tiled floor survive throughout rising in two low steps to the site of the altar at the east end, although most of the internal render has been lost. An aumbry – possibly reused and medieval– is set into the north wall west of the door and the base and two broken pieces of a plain medieval font tub survive just south of this in the nave. A nineteenth century piscina with a pointed hoodmould and trefoil-headed compartments is set in the chancel south wall. The church became redundant when the parish merged with Tintern Parva in 1972; a fire in 1977 reduced it to a roofless ruin.

The monument is of national importance for its potential to enhance our knowledge of medieval and later Christian religious worship, ritual and practice. It retains significant archaeological potential, with a strong probability of earlier structural remains. The rebuilding on at least one occasion reflects changes in liturgical requirements and the changing aspirations of patrons and parishioners. It shares group value with Tintern Abbey (MM102), as both a property owned by the former and as the subjects of Romantic and antiquarian art. Historical documentation provides evidence for the remodelling of the church, which in spite of its ruined state is a relatively unaltered example of the work of the prolific John Pritchard.

The scheduled area comprises the remains described and area around them within which related evidence may be expected to survive. It is an irregular rectangle in shape and measures 23m ESE-WNE by a maximum of 20.2m. where it widens around the projecting tower and vestry. It excludes any graves that fall within the area.