The church of St John the Baptist is located in the centre of the village, above the north bank of the Afon Dwyfor in a partly rounded churchyard used, and extended, as a cemetery. It is a nineteenth-century church built on a more ancient site of which church no obvious traces remain nor of a successor church built in 1819. The present church was built in 1862 to designs of Henry Kennedy in a High Victorian Gothic style. It is built of roughly coursed squared microgranite with gritstone dressings and slate roofs with coped gables. The building consists of a buttressed nave with a gabled south porch, a short narrower chancel, and large north and south transepts. Double buttresses at the west end rise from a wide battered base to a gabled bellcote with three openings for bells. Inside, the nave is unusually wide and spacious, walls plastered and painted. It is roofed with simple, slender, trussed rafters. The truss at the junction of nave with transepts is arch-braced from low stone corbels, and this has a similar arch-braced collar truss at the start of each transept, together defining the crossing. The floor is quarry tiled, encaustic tiles in the crossing, and mosaic in the sanctuary. Fittings include a stone reredos of five bays on short trilobed red marble columns; a carved stone and marble pulpit in the form of an octagon raised over four steps (1878); and the font, a plain octagonal stone bowl with oak cover. Both pulpit and reredos commemorate Samuel Owen Priestley, d.1872, and his wife. Stained glass includes (in the east window) work by T.Baillie & Co (1863). In the nave are monuments dating from the period 1730-1955.
Sources:
Cadw Listing description.
R.Haslam, J.Orbach & Adam Voelcker, Buildings of Wales: Gwynedd (2009), p.462.

RCAHMW, 11 March 2016