Peace and wyverns in the Black Mountains

After walking for an hour and half north from Abergavenny, over the Grwyne Fawr river that marks the border of Breconshire, along the valley side where water spills across the asphalt of the narrow road, up a steep banked lane where hazel and hawthorn branches drip rain down your neck, you suddenly break out into the open winter sunshine to see on the your right a stone lych-gate and a hillside churchyard with a few headstones, and beyond it the grey stone gable and bell-cote of an old church, smaller than the yews around it. This is St Issui.

The little church is silent, chill and numinous. But the great feature to be admired is the intricately carved rood loft that spans the nave above the open screen fencing off the chancel. The bare golden wood of the parapet is carved into 17 panels of pierced Gothic tracery. The great beam or bressummer that supports it (pictured) is carved with fruiting vine (not a native plant, but chosen as an emblem of the Eucharist), gripped at each end by the jaws of a coil-tailed wyvern.

It’s a marvellous piece of work, dating from the early 16th century, and all the more striking for its rarity. A loft like this once held candles burning beside a carved image of Christ on the Cross, with on either side the Virgin Mary and St John. In Edward VI’s reign it was directed that these lofts, very common at the time, should be demolished, and they were. Here at the village of Partrishow (or Patricio) it wasn’t.

Nor were the stone altars demolished here. One stands, with its carved consecration crosses still visible, in a chapel beyond the west end of the church and only communicating with it by a window. This is the old pilgrimage chapel of St Issui, who may be buried here.

The church was consecrated in 1060, but the only recognisable feature from that period is in the main church, the cylindrical font, with a leafy belt round the rim and, remarkably enough, in ancient letters, the inscription “Menhir me fecit in tempore Genillin,” the latter being the local lord.

This lovely church is one of the 59 covered in the well-illustrated Tiny Churches by Dixe Wills (AA, £16.99). Dixe Wills is the author of Tiny Islands, Tiny Stations and Tiny Campsites. You spot the theme. The author’s language is a little fey and breathless, but the churches he chooses are excellent.

The celebrated cliffside chapel of St Govan in Pembrokeshire has a setting that “is truly spine-tingling”. The Anglo-Saxon church of St Peter-on-the-Wall, Bradwell, shows “simple comeliness”. But at the Old Church of St Mary the Virgin, Preston Candover (cared for by the Churches Preservation Trust), he is taken by “the Victorian prolixity and heraldic sensibilities” of a single window. It is certainly unusual. Diagonally across the glass, bands of script alternate with little grisaille roses, fleurs-de-lys and the IHS monogram.

The text says: “We beseech thee, O Lord, pour thy grace into our hearts; that as we have known the Incarnation of thy Son Jesus Christ by the message of an angel, so by his Cross and Passion we may be brought unto the glory of his Resurrection: through the same Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” Dixe Wills exclaims: “The text itself could do with a good editor to sharpen it up.” Yet it is simply a standard Anglican version of the Latin prayer said at the Angelus. It forms the Collect for the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Book of Common Prayer written by the Tudor churchman Thomas Cranmer, no Victorian and generally admired as a stylist. These tiny things matter.