Continuing a series covering the breadth of churches in the URC, Reform visits Maesyronnen

Maesyronnen Chapel has many distinctions. It is the oldest Nonconformist church in Wales still in use, and among the earliest Nonconformist churches to be built there. It is a chapel that comes with holiday accommodation attached. And it was the subject of a poem by the great RS Thomas.

Thomas, who had visited Maesyronnen in 1947, was not entirely flattering in his description, talking of ‘the dry, locked doors,/And the stale piety, mouldering within’. But he was also captivated, as other visitors and worshippers are, by the air ‘heady with the scent/Of the years past and others yet to be’. In fact, he said elsewhere, he had ‘a vision in which I could comprehend the breadth and length and depth and height of the mystery of creation’….

Stephen Tomkins is Editor of Reform

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This is an extract from an article published in the March 2022 edition of Reform

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