St Mary's Church, Cefn, is strikingly located on a natural rocky rise overlooking the Vale of Clwyd immediately to the north of the village centre, within a low-walled elevated churchyard.
It is a small, well-preserved estate church in simple plate-tracery Gothic style built in 1864 for Sir Watkyn Williams-Wynn to designs of Benjamin Ferrey. The plan is simple cruciform comprising apsidal chancel, nave, north and south transepts (the one screened off as a vestry, the other used as an organ chamber), and a south porch. It is constructed of rough-dressed limestone blocks, the choir snecked and with chamfered plinth, and limestone dressings. The slate roof is steeply-pitched with slab-coped gable parapets.
Interior features include a tall nave with four-bay arched-braced collar truss roof, the trusses carried on moulded stone corbels; a font in the form of a life-sized white marble sculpture of a winged angel kneeling; sandstone pulpit in Early-English-style; and a rib-vaulted polygonal apse.
sources: D.R.Thomas, History of the Diocese of St Asaph vol.1 (1908), p.392-3.
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David Leighton, RCAHMW, 14 October 2014