Llangernyw

The tree came first

Almost every Welsh village can be told from its church outwards. Llangernyw has to be told from a tree that was already standing when someone chose this ground to build on.

1. A tree, then a church

   The churchyard is roughly oval: the shape of an early enclosure rather than a laid-out plot. The yew stands north of the church, its heartwood entirely gone, offshoots growing on around the space. Some authorities take it to have been on this ground before Christianity reached the valley. The board beside it, placed by the Tree Council, puts it at over four thousand years old; the measurable facts are a girth of 10.75 metres at ground level, and 1,036 centimetres recorded here in 1998.

2. Digain, and the stones that outlasted him

   The dedication is to Digain, said to have lived in the fifth century; the building is much later, probably thirteenth-century on the site of an earlier church, and Grade II* listed. Two stones about 1.4 metres high, each cut with a cross, stand against its south wall: early medieval, and the oldest worked stone anyone here has to show. A Grade II lychgate closes the churchyard to the west.

3. Three rivers and a turnpike

   The Cledwen, the Collen and the Gallen meet at the village, and it is from here that the river is called the Elwy. The crossing made a place; the road made it a stop. Grade II bridges survive at Pont Faen, Pont Sylltu and Pont Ty’n-y-ddol, a listed milestone stands on the A548 south of the village, and two toll-gates — posts, gates and turnstiles — still stand on the lane running west.

4. Hafodunos, and where the money came from

   The estate belonged to the Lloyd family from about the early thirteenth century, with a manor house of 1674. In 1830 it passed to Samuel Sandbach of Liverpool, a slave-owner, and Liverpool money rebuilt it: Sir George Gilbert Scott designed the present hall between 1861 and 1866, the only secular building he raised in Wales. The Sandbachs are buried a hundred metres east of the church, in a mausoleum of their own.

5. The shoemaker’s son

   Henry Jones was born in the village on 30 November 1852 and worked at his father’s bench while he studied. He became Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow, was knighted in 1912 and made a Companion of Honour in 1922, the year he died. A memorial fund opened his childhood home as a museum in 1934, and it is still one. He is buried at Kilbride on the Isle of Bute, not here.