Service Times
Sunday
9:30am – Holy Eucharist (Every 1st Sunday)
St Martin’s is open daily to visitors – we look forward to welcoming you soon.
| Parking | Very limited parking around church, parking bays are limited to 4. |
| Churchyard paths | Uneven stones steps down from parking bays. Handrails in places. |
| Door access | Wide door for wheelchair use. Step into church. |
| Inside church | 4 uneven steps up to communion rail. Handrail on the both walls to aid. Room for wheelchair at end of pews. |
| Accessible toilet | Unfortunately, there is no toilet facility on-site. |
| Induction Loop | There is no induction loop at this church. |
History
Welcome to the ‘wonky’ church! It is more than likely that there was a church at Cwmyoy before the Norman Conquest. Dedicated to St Martin of Tours, this church’s structure mostly dates from the 12th and 13th century. The church is most notable for its extreme tilt, the result of a landslide. No part of it is square or at right angles with any other part. This has led to many attempts to strengthen the church and prevent its collapse, through the use of substantial tie beams and buttresses. The church is in the Gothic style, and has a chancel, nave, south porch, and western tower. A round-headed north window dates to the 12th century, and the nave roof has been dated to the late 13th or early 14th century. St Martin’s is a Grade I listed building and an active parish church.
The church is difficult to date but the North-West window in the nave is the oldest feature, from the 12th century. The underlying geology is of Old Red Sandstone overlying marl, and processes of slippage and subsidence over the centuries have caused the tower and chancel to move in opposite directions, twisting the entire structure.
The initial landslips must have occurred soon after the original construction as the medieval fabric of the church shows evidence of repairs and rebuilding in attempts to address the instability of the site. The tower is medieval but cannot be dated with certainty. It leans 5.2 degrees out of perpendicular (compared with Pisa, which is admittedly somewhat higher, at 4.7 degrees. The large buttresses to support it were built in the 1960s.
St Martin’s is known as “the crooked church” due to the extreme nature of its non-alignment and has been called “the most crooked in Britain”. The church is part of the Llanvihangel Crucorney Pastoral District, along with Llanthony.
During the monastic days, Cwmyoy was served by monks sent out by Llanthony Priory. After the Dissolution, curates were appointed. During the 18th century, Cwmyoy became a perpetual curacy. Finally, in 1830, it became a Vicarage, being formally joined to Llanthony. This was a formal recognition of an existing arrangement, since the curates had always shared both benefices.
The church is constructed of Old Red Sandstone rubble with stone-tiled roofs. The architectural style is Gothic and the building comprises a nave, chancel, porch and a three-storeyed tower with a castellated parapet. The interior is slightly less altered than the exterior, the nave roof dating from the late 13th or early 14th centuries.
The unevenness of the structure remains very evident, however, the writer Simon Jenkins noting, “visitors might be on the deck of a galleon in a storm, with the chancel about to slide overboard”. The Monmouthshire writer and artist Fred Hando describes the church chancel as an example of a “weeping chancel”, where the non-alignment of the nave and chancel axes was deliberate and was intended to represent the body of Christ in death, the nave standing for the body and the chancel standing for the head, fallen to the right.
The medieval cross in the centre of the church was dug up in 1861 at the nearby farm and kept in the farm garden. In 1935, it was placed in the tower inside the church. In 1967, the cross was found to be missing. A photograph was shown to the Keeper of British and Mediaeval Antiques at the British Museum, and the Keeper not only dates it as being 13th/14th century, but that he had recently seen the cross in an antique dealer’s shop in London. From there it was recovered, returned to the church and safely set in concrete. The thieves were never traced.
An unusual and curious feature of the cross is the mitre with three crosses on the head of Christ. Although the unsophisticated nature of the carving would suggest an early date, the chamfered edges indicate that it is post-conquest. it has been suggested that it is a rustic copy of another cross, or taken from a manuscript.
The rood screen is a “remarkable work of craftsmanship”. The church’s windows are 16th-century and the communion rails date to the 17th century. A number of 18th- and 19th-century funeral monuments within the church were constructed by three generations of the Brute family of the distant village of Llanbedr, near Crickhowell.
The tower contains a set of six bells dating from 1672, 1697, 1700, 1700, 1722 and 1722. Cadw notes that a set of this age with such contiguous dates is “a rarity”. However, the bells cannot be rung in the proper manner, as one or more of the bells are cracked or broken and the tower has been deemed incapable of supporting the forces generated by change ringing.
The church was restored in 1887, when some of the windows were replaced, plaster was removed from the chancel arch and plaster ceiling of the nave removed. It is possible that the moulded plaster decorations set in the porch wall are remnants of the ceiling. Marks on the roof timbers in the nave show where the former plaster ceiling was fastened with nails. The beams across the nave were added in the 16th-17th century, and the iron stay in the 1960s.
The church is a Grade I listed building, its listing noting its “interesting history, distinctive historic character and fine fittings”.