Garway

 

The previous Bredwardine and Tintern pictures were not the result of a literary pilgrimage but part of a short tour aimed at taking in the Herefordshire border country from which my finally identified genetic ancestors came, a grandfather born in Pencoyd and his father and grandparents born in Garway.

I hadn’t realised the extent to which (in the same way that the Anglo-Scottish border has ‘debatable lands’) the Anglo-Welsh border was not fully defined.  The Welsh sounding name Pencoyd (and the neighbouring Llanwern) is one hint.  The history on the wall inside Garway church was another hint: the Bishop of Hereford received complaints in the Fourteenth Century that their parish priest could not be understood by the majority of his parishioners because he only spoke English.

The next bit of the border country to the north is the old March of Ewyas, parts of whose lands were allocated across both Welsh and English shires in the Sixteenth Century, and a number of whose parishes on the present English side were only transferred from the diocese of St David’s to that of Hereford in the Ninteenth Century.

Garway Church (among the 1000 best in the country according to Sir Simon Jenkins) here is a Templar foundation and the photo does not really catch how substantial their tower was, with a circular nave next to it since replaced by the present church.