St Martin's Church & the Grave

The church you can date by its courses

St Martin's can be read like a sentence: a thirteenth-century church, rebuilt by its medieval lords, standing whole from the fifteenth century, and restored by the Victorians.

It is a Grade II\ church, listed on 30 November 1966, part-coursed limestone rubble with freestone at the edges (Verified-strong for the grade; Verified for the fabric). The plan is a cross laid on the ground: a crossing tower with transepts, a three-bay chancel, an aisleless four-bay nave, porches on three sides, and, tucked to the south, a little post-medieval store the town calls the "Bone House" — a charnel house, both authorities agree.

Now the reading. The church is thirteenth-century in origin, then rebuilt in the fourteenth century by a Guy de Brian, lord of Laugharne — the same marcher family whose green stone refaced the castle down the hill, and whose Garter knight carries the great castle-and-church-and-charter knot. The nave, chancel, transepts and tower you see standing are thought to be a single-phase mid-fifteenth-century rebuild — and here is the proof, underfoot: when the Victorians opened the floor in 1873–74 they found the footings of a shorter, narrower earlier nave beneath, the ghost of the thirteenth-century church the fifteenth-century one swallowed.

The details reward a slow eye. The sheer amount of internal buttressing is, on Coflein's authority, "unique in south Wales" — a claim worth keeping exactly that size, and quite separate from the Corporation's own "unique in Wales" down the hill (Verified, attributed). The crossing tower was lowered in 1873 and is thought once to have carried a fourth storey; its stair-turret goes by the wonderful name of the "King's Seat." And the two great Victorian campaigns — 1855/6 and 1873 — were both drawn by R. Kyrke Penson, the county surveyor, with storm-damage repairs still going on as late as 1954.

Four hands in one building: a thirteenth-century foundation, a de Brian rebuild, a fifteenth-century church standing whole, and the Victorians who took a storey off the tower and gave it back its roof. Step inside — the next tales take what those hands left there.

The record: Cadw listed building 9623 (St Martin's Church, Grade II, listed 30 November 1966); Royal Commission / Coflein NPRN 102141: the thirteenth-century origin and fourteenth-century de Brian rebuild, the earlier nave footings found in 1873–74, the "unique in south Wales" buttressing, the tower lowered in 1873 and its "King's Seat" turret, the restorations of 1855/6 and 1873 by R. Kyrke Penson, and storm repairs of 1954.

Two records, two saints, one church

This church was St Michael's before it was St Martin's, and the new saint may have arrived with its medieval rebuilding.

Three separate authorities carry the switch. The Church in Wales heritage record says it flatly: the church is "now dedicated to St Martin, but formerly dedicated to St Michael (so referred to in both 1494 and 1849)." The Cult of the Saints in Wales, a University of Wales project read at source, puts it in the careful language of scholarship: "At Laugharne there is a 13th-century record of a Michael church and so Martin may be an error, though it is possible that Martin was the dedication of a separate, or rebuilt, church … of the later fourteenth century." And RCAHMW notes the original dedication "may have been to St Michael." Two firm facts fall out: a thirteenth-century record of a "Michael church" at Laugharne exists, and the parish was still called St Michael's in 1494, and again in 1849.

Now watch it line up with the stone. The St Martin dedication may belong to the later-fourteenth-century rebuild — the de Brian church of the last tale. A parish that was St Michael's in the thirteenth century, rebuilt by its lord in the fourteenth, and emerging as St Martin's: the saint changing exactly when the building did. That is a reading the record invites — and it is not pushed past what the record will bear.

And there is a thread still hanging. A royal record of 1223 — a "Sancti Michaelis de Talachar" on the Patent Rolls — has been proposed as the earliest dated appearance of the town's name, sixty years before the 1283 "Thalkan." The obvious objection was always the saint: if the church is St Martin's, why would a king's clerk write Michael? That objection is now gone — the church truly was St Michael's in the thirteenth century — so the 1223 form fits Laugharne. But the Patent Roll entry itself has not yet been read at object level; it sits behind a subscription wall or in a scan no machine can crack. So the earliest-name claim waits: the door is unlocked, the page not yet turned.

A church with two names, the change tracking a rebuild, and a royal record that may push the town's own name back six decades — held, for now, on a single page nobody has been able to open.

The record: Church in Wales Heritage Record 2987 (St Michael in 1494 and 1849); The Cult of the Saints in Wales / Seintiadur (University of Wales, 2023); Royal Commission / Coflein NPRN 102141 (original dedication "may have been to St Michael"). Calendar of the Patent Rolls, Henry III, vol. 1 (1216–25): the 1223 "Sancti Michaelis de Talachar" entry, not yet read at source.

The stone older than the town

Set into the wall of St Martin's is a carved cross of the ninth or tenth century — older than the castle, the charter and the town itself.

The national record dates it in its own exact words: "a ninth or tenth century cross with knotwork to the stem and marginal cable moulding". Read the ornament and you read the date — knotwork twisting up the stem, a cable moulding running the margin, the whole vocabulary of pre-Norman Welsh stone-carving. That is its entire significance, and it is enough. The standing church is fifteenth-century over fourteenth over thirteenth; the Cross of Laugharne is the hard evidence that a Christian site stood on this hill before any of it — before the borough, before the charter, before there was a Laugharne to worship in. Pinning its exact place in the specialist corpus — Nash-Williams, and Westwood's Lapidarium Walliae, which actually pictures "the Cross of Laugharne" — waits on a library day (the record's dating Verified; the corpus reading Referenced-pending).

Around the cross cluster other hints of a long, deep past, and each is held carefully, below fact. A Roman cinerary urn was reportedly found beneath this same south transept during the 1873–74 restoration — and, tellingly, Mary Curtis's Antiquities of Laugharne of 1880 independently prints a plate of an "Urn found under the floor of the south transept," two sources setting a reported Roman urn at the very spot as the early-medieval cross. A small "wheel-topped stone" is said to have turned up in grave-digging; cist burials are reported from the churchyard; and the church's probable earlier St Michael dedication is itself a mark of deep pre-Reformation life. None of it is promoted — the urn and the wheel-stone rest on the record's own "reportedly," and no borrowed Roman-Wales or Ice-Age glamour is imported to dress the site (all Referenced-pending).

What can be said plainly is the one Verified thing that matters: in a church whose oldest walls are medieval, there stands a stone three or four centuries older still — and it means people knelt to pray on this hill before there was a town to hold them.

The record: Royal Commission / Coflein NPRN 102141: "a ninth or tenth century cross with knotwork to the stem and marginal cable moulding"; the reported urn, wheel-topped stone and cist burials. Mary Curtis, The Antiquities of Laugharne (1880): plate of an "Urn found under the floor of the south transept". The specialist corpus — V. E. Nash-Williams, The Early Christian Monuments of Wales (1950), and J. O. Westwood, Lapidarium Walliae (1876) — not yet checked for this stone.

The marks one family left in the church

The carved oak screen and the churchyard gate of St Martin's were both given in memory of one family — the Wienholts, whose name is spelled two ways.

Look first at the rood screen across the entrance to the chancel — the most conspicuous gift they left. Cadw dates it to 1909; The Welshman caught the moment it was dedicated. On the Sunday evening of 27 March 1910, the Bishop of St David's "unveiled and dedicated an elegantly designed screen … to the memory of the late Ed. Weinholt, Esq." It is oak, in fifteenth-century style, five bays, near fourteen feet high, its central shield carrying the family crest and the date A.D. 1910 — designed by Charles E. Ponting, F.S.A., of Marlborough, and cut by Herbert Read of the St Sidwell's Art Works, Exeter. Both papers agree it remembers Edward Wienholt and his wife Ellen Williams Wienholt; both name the givers — their three sons and three daughters (Verified-strong screen; Verified donors).

Three years on came the second gift, and with it a trap for the careless reader. In July 1913 the Archdeacon of St David's dedicated a lych-gate at St Martin's, "erected by Miss Helen Weinholt in memory of her sister, Miss Mary Frances Weinholt, who died at Reading in [18]96." No lych-gate is separately listed anywhere in the township records — so this one newspaper report is its record. And here is where you must slow down: Helen Weinholt, who gave the gate for her sister, is not Ellen Williams-Weinholt, Edward's wife and a dedicatee of the 1910 screen. Two women, one letter apart; two memorials; two different subjects. The only way anyone ever untangles a near-collision like that is to read each object rather than trust the name.

And the 1913 report does the one thing the whole thread had been waiting for: it says outright that "the Weinholt family were for many years residents of the town, occupying Laugharne Castle and Island House." There it is — the plain sentence that ties these church memorials to Frederick Wienholt, the Island House occupant of 1863–1881, whose story runs on into Book One. The spelling wavers all the way — Weinholt, Wienholt, even Wienhiolt — but it is variance, not two families. One thread stays loose, honestly: a notice before the 1910 service spoke of a tablet to a Frederick Weinholt, while the screen itself went to Edward. The likeliest reading is that the screen commemorates Edward and Ellen while a separate interior tablet — the one Cadw records blocking the old rood-loft door — commemorates Frederick. But that tablet's own inscription has never been read, so the Frederick question is held open (Verified family identity; Referenced-pending the Frederick tablet). A screen, a gate, and a tablet still unread: one Island House family, cut into the fabric of the town's church.

The record: Cadw listed building 9623 (the rood screen, dated 1909); The Welshman, 1 April 1910, and Evening Express, 28 March 1910 (the dedication of the screen, its designer Charles E. Ponting FSA and maker Herbert Read of St Sidwell's, Exeter); Cambria Daily Leader, 31 July 1913 (the lych-gate given by Miss Helen Weinholt).

The stone that names and the ground that keeps

The names a town cuts in stone and the bodies the tide brings it are not, here, the same list of men.

The memorial is no cross or obelisk. It is two black slate tablets, white-lettered, on a rough white stone, in a small walled plot with a bench and gravel — one tablet for each war. The Imperial War Museums' register reads forty-seven men — thirty-five from the First World War, twelve from the Second — under "ROLL OF HONOUR / LAUGHARNE" and the cut line "NOW ARE THEY CROWNED AND RECIEVE PALMS." The misspelling is the mason's; it is left exactly as he set it. At the base stands a separate plaque to William Charles Fuller VC, the town's only Victoria Cross — his own story kept to his own telling, not repeated here. And the Memorial Hall is itself a war memorial, separately recorded, its tablet cut "LEST WE FORGET … THIS HALL IS ERECTED TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF OUR FALLEN HEROES" (Verified; two register records give conflicting addresses for one shared grid point, held Referenced-pending).

Now turn to the ground. In St Martin's churchyard lie six war graves — two from the First War, three from the Second, one of them unidentified — and five carry names. Read those five against the stone, and the finding rises up: only two of them — Private Daniel John Richards, a Laugharne boy of eighteen who died a month after the Armistice, and Private J. L. Griffith — are also cut into the town memorial. The other three are not. Lieutenant Bridgeman Rochfort Mordaunt-Smith, RNVR, whose widow lived in Sussex; Sergeant Thomas Brian Owen, RAF, whose family was in Carmarthen. Buried in Laugharne's ground; never cut into Laugharne's record (Verified graves; Referenced-pending the memorial cross-reference).

And one grave belongs to a man the memorial never knew at all. Able Seaman Domingo Mobile, of the Mercantile Marine — "Born in Venezuela" — died on or about 1 February 1918, aged thirty-nine, lost with the little London steamer SS Sofie: 354 tons, sunk by a submarine in the Bristol Channel that month with eight souls, her master among them. He lies here under a Special Memorial — the mark set when a man is known to be in the ground but his exact plot can no longer be found — and he appears neither on the town memorial nor in its roll of honour at all. Why a Venezuelan seaman, lost a few miles offshore, came to rest in this one Carmarthenshire churchyard, the records do not say — and it is left an open question, not a guessed one. He is the truest measure of the difference between the two kinds of remembering: the stone names the town's own; the ground keeps whoever the sea brought to it. One quiet caution to close: the modern wooden cross in the memorial plot is part of the memorial, and is not the plain white cross of Dylan Thomas's grave in the churchyard extension. Different objects, different ground. The town's war dead are a stop of their own.

The record: Docs 372 (WMR), 365 (CWGC 74978), 370 (SS Sofie).

Griffith Jones & Madam Bevan — the schoolroom of a nation

From this small tide-town, two people ran the largest schoolroom in eighteenth-century Britain.

They only work as a pair — that is the first true thing about them. On his own, he is a clergyman with an idea. On her own, she is a widow with money. Join them, and a whole nation learns to read.

He was Griffith Jones, curate here in Laugharne by 1709, master of the town's little schoolroom. Then he moved a few miles to Llanddowror and had the idea that made his name: the circulating school. Not a building — a travelling teacher. He would send a master into a parish for the dead winter months, teach the poor to read Welsh from the Bible, and move him on to the next parish come spring. Cheap. Portable. And it caught like fire. By 1773, its best year, the movement counted 242 schools and 13,205 pupils — in a country of perhaps half a million souls. Reckon that as a share, and few nations on earth were learning their letters faster.

He could not have done it without her. Bridget Bevan — "Madam Bevan" — married Arthur Bevan of Laugharne in 1721 and came to live in the town. She became the schools' patron, then their adviser, and at the last their director: the one who actually ran the machine. And she ran it from here.

Then the tenderness. In 1755, when Griffith Jones's wife died, Madam Bevan took the old man into her own Laugharne house. He lived there six years and died there, on 8 April 1761. When her own turn came she left the schools £10,000 — a fortune — and two of her fellow trustees at once went to law over it. The money froze in Chancery for the better part of thirty years while a nation's schoolrooms went dark. That is part of the truth too: the Laugharne chapter ends not in triumph but in a lawsuit.

And at the very centre sits a mystery made of absence. Nobody can say which house it was. The records carry three candidates and not one source that names the building for certain. So stand where you are and know that somewhere within a few streets of you stood the room from which a nation was taught to read — and that we cannot, honestly, point to the door. (And whatever a hopeful voice may tell you: no source this programme has read connects any of it to Island House. The link is unmade, and we leave it unmade.)

Walk up to St Martin's — Griffith Jones held the curacy there, and Arthur Bevan's monument still stands on the nave's south wall. The lost house lies somewhere behind the Town Hall.