DescriptionHoly Trinity church is located on the north-west side of the Henllan to Trefnant road (B5428) at the south-western edge of the village, set back from the road within a churchyard used (and extended) as a cemetery, and entered through a lych-gate. It was lavishly built as a memorial church between 1853 and 1855 to the memory of Colonel John Lloyd Salusbury of Galltfaenan Hall by his daughters Mrs Townsend Mainwaring and Mrs Charles Mainwaring. The church was designed by architect Sir George Gilbert Scott of London and was conceived in his characteristic 'middle-pointed', early Decorated style of the late thirteenth/early fourteenth century. It is constructed of uncoursed, dressed limestone blocks on a slightly-battered plinth and with limestone dressings, under steeply-pitched roofs, saddle-backed to aisled nave, of (original) copper-coloured Westmoreland slates, oversailing eaves with kneelered gable parapets and overlapping copings with stone gable crosses; windows with Geometric tracery. (The church is aligned north-east by south-west and liturgical directions are here given). The church comprises aisled nave with windows rising to cross gables, gabled south porch, chancel with gabled south doorway, double bellcote over chancel arch, gabled north chapel adjoining flush with chancel and two-stage chimney in the valley between the gables, and adjoining the chapel to the north is a single-storey early twentieth-century vestry of 1906-7 by Sir Giles Scott.
The interior is richly decorated, with polished shafts and foliated capitals especially to the arcades, under a fine clustered scissor-truss roof, on stone-corbelled wall plate; simple roofs to the aisles. The stepped-up chancel, stripped of its plaster, has a pointed waggon vault, compartmented with wooden moulded ribbing and Perpendicular-style gilded and polychromed shields and bosses. The nave is floored in black and red quarry tile, the chancel with Inlaid marble (in memory of W P Jones of Llannerch, 1955) and similar to stepped-up sanctuary. Fittings and furnishings include an elaborate Early English style font of Llaniestyn red-stone with three different additional types of marble, raised up on a tooled limestone plinth of cruciform plan; a square pulpit of similar style and material with marble stepped access; oak choir stalls in Arts and Crafts Perpendicular style; and a narrow pierced Perpendicular oak screen to the north chapel from the north aisle. Stained glass includes contemporary grisaille work to the west window by James Powell and Sons, and in the east window work by William Wailes (1854).
Sources:
Cadw Listing description.
E.Hubbard, Buildings of Wales: Clwyd (1986), p.289-90.
RCAHMW, 13 October 2015