St Mary's Church, New Radnor, is located at the end of a lane on the north side of the village, terraced into a steep slope below the castle earthworks. A nineteenth-century building, it lies on the site of at least one predecessor church. It was built in 1843-5 to plans of Henry Adams of Hereford. It consists of nave with short transepts (added slightly later), five-sided quasi-chancel, and three-stage tower-porch on the west gable with angled buttresses and paired belfry lights. Inside, the nave roof has tie-beams with pendants on carved head-masks. The west gallery has painted panelling with blank arcading.
The old church had a south aisle with an arcade on octagonal piers and a west tower, shown as embattled on Speed's 1610 map. The font, with octagonal bowl on clustered shafts - possibly fourteenth century - is all that survives of that church. Since construction the apse has been superseded by bringing forward the altar on polygonal steps, a design of George Pace (1964).
Painted features included now destroyed alabaster panels depicting St Thomas Becket, and a lost ‘suspended’ benefactions board.
Sources include:
R.Scourfield & R.Haslam, Buildings of Wales: Powys (2013), p.380-1.
Richard Suggett, Painted Temples: Wallpaintings and Rood-screens in Welsh Churches, 1200–1800, (RCAHMW 2021), pp. 222.
RCAHMW 2022