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Llanthony Priory: Eyewitness to Welsh history Llanthony Priory, Wales

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Llanthony Priory is located in Monmouthshire, Wales, about 53 miles west and a little north of Gloucester. From the A465 road, exit at Crucorney and go north. The Offa Dyke Path runs within a kilometer and forms part of the border between England and Wales.

*****

The Welsh people have a reputation for possessing a strong streak of mysticism, perhaps rooted in their Druidic and Pictish antecedents. Their lovely country is dotted with ruins of Medieval abbeys and priories.

I don’t share that interest in mysticism, but I am intensely interested in Medieval history. So when I found myself facing a road sign that said, in effect, “Llanthony Priory thataway,” I did what any reasonable history freak would do: I went thataway.

Twenty minutes later, having driven up winding single-lane roads edged on both sides with 8′ tall hedgerows that made driving a real adventure, I found myself in a car-park surrounded on one side by open meadows, on another by an ancient but functional building, and on the last two by the ruins of Llanthony (”Thlantony,” sort of, with a very soft “th”) Priory.

Like many of the old religious buildings in Great Britain, Llanthony had a brief but tempestuous history. Its founding was wildly romantic: One fine day in 1100, a knight named Sir William de Lacy was out hunting and came across the ruins of an ancient church dedicated to St. David, the patron saint of Wales. He immediately decided to build a new church. Accompanied by Ersinus, a priest formerly in the service of Queen Mathilda, wife of King Henry I, he and their followers built their church and dedicated it to St. John the Baptist. In 1118, the church became an Augustinian priory, the first in Britain. It did well, hosting royalty and growing to include 40 canons and numerous lay members.

It’s located far up in the isolated and beautiful Vale of Ewys, in the Black Mountains region of Breton Beacons Park. That same isolation was the cause of much of its early trouble, because it was nearly impossible to protect from the depredations of the marauding Welsh. So in 1135, the canons abandoned Llanthony and moved first to Hereford and then to Gloucester, where they founded a daughter priory known as Lantonia Secunda. (At that point, the original Llanthony Priory became known as Lantonia Prima.)

By 1175, however, things in Wales had settled down and the monks returned to Lantonia Prima. Between 1180 and 1230, they built a new church, the one whose ruins are visible today. The church, one of the greatest in Wales, was a mixture of Norman and Gothic architectural styles, combining Norman round-topped arches with Gothic pointed ones. While large and simple, with little ornamentation and few of the architectural flourishes seen in other such buildings, its design was quite sophisticated, incorporating all the building technology available at the time, indicating that it had been endowed with money and power.

All went reasonably well until the early 1400s, when Owain Glyndwr’s rebellion against English rule caused most of the monks to retreat once again to their house in Gloucester. In 1481, it was formally merged with the Gloucester house and ceased to exist as an autonomous priory.

Llanthony fell to the same fate as other religious houses in Great Britain in 1538 when King Henry VIII ordered the Dissolution; it was sold for £160 to someone who apparently had no interest in it and let it go to ruin. It lay abandoned and decaying until the late 18th century, when it was bought by Col. Sir Mark Wood, who dreamed of turning it into a hunting lodge. In 1807, he sold it to Walter Savage Landor, a poet with dreams of life as a country gentleman. He set about restoring the buildings, but went bankrupt in the attempt and eventually abandoned them once again. It was sold again, in the 20th century, and in the 1980s came under the conservatorship of Cadw, the Welsh equivalent of English Heritage and Historic Scotland.

Architecturally, most of the priory is in ruins, with a few notable exceptions. Two sides of the tower that topped the crossing between nave and choir survive, and it’s thought that there was originally a clock in the tower, which would have been an object of wonder. The large window openings on the south side of the transept remain, as does a substantial part of the north aisle arcade. The west end of the church gives a good idea of what the building would have looked like. For the rest, most of what remains ranges from footings to partial walls. A visitor in 1803 wrote of actually witnessing the fall of the great west window, which must have been quite a sight.

The isolated location of Llanthony Priory would normally lend itself to silence and a strong sense of history and timelessness. However, when I visited, the Prior’s House on the west side of the cloister, and the southwest tower, both of which Col. Wood had restored as his hunting lodge, were serving as a small hotel. The cook was singing as she worked, and between that and the gentle sounds of her pots and pans, the Priory straddled the Medieval and the contemporary. It was a charming and homey juxtaposition, but only by wandering to the far end of the ruins, away from the pleasant sounds from the kitchen, could I bathe in the same sense of history that I had experienced at Rievaulx and Valle Crucis.

It takes some effort to get to Llanthony Priory; you have to want to go there. Once you do, though, you’ll find it well worth it.

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