Today we're out in rural Wales continuing our tradition of naming featured chapels and churches after made-up saints. We approached tentatively, given that last time I set foot in a derelict chapel, God banned me on Facebook. I guess this is how they smite blasphemers in the digital age, or maybe his "spontaneous combust" button was broken or something.
This chapel was built in 1833, but it was rebuilt in 1868 when God said "Guys, I want my church to have a gable entrance, because they're fashionable right now."
The architect was a well-known chapel architect of the time, whose parents must have hated him, because they made sure his first name was the same as his last, christening him Thomas Thomas. He's built over 100 chapels throughout Wales, and one in Oswestry, in Shropshire.
This one closed its doors for good in 1973, and it's been falling into decay ever since. Rumour has it that the owner closed the chapel and fled abroad in order to avoid paying a bill of £250,000 to make the derelict church walls safe and less likely to crumble and fall on passing motorists.
But this is probably false. If it posed that much of a danger, and the owner just left in 1973, the powers that be would have at least erected some sort of safety measure by now, and they haven't, in spite of the bill going unpaid.
The truth about derelict chapels is simple. If one considers how rural Wales can get, imagine it back in the time before motorized transport and the internet. Back in the 1800s, a remote Welsh congregation would have been fairly isolated from the rest of the world, with the church being a communual hub. People didn't come here to hear about Jesus, they came here to catch up with their friends afterwards.
However, as the rest of the world became more accessible, the tinier chapels began to lose their usefulness to the community, and eventually many simply no longer had a purpose.
The interior is bloody gorgeous though.
Written here is "Duw Cariad Yw," which means "God Loves."
Except, he doesn't. I've never understood where the whole concept of a loving God came from. In the original source material, the bible, he's very much the antagonist of the story. All of the humans are just doing their thing, getting fat, shooting their DNA into each other, calling each other racist on Twitter for doing something not even remotely racist. You know, human stuff. And then along comes God, and he's like "Worship me or I'll kill your kids."
Look, I'm no expert on love, and I dont really want to be. All humans do is confuse and irritate me. But I'm pretty sure that if I went on Tinder and opened with "Worship me or I'll kill your kids" then it's guaranteed that I'll be dying alone. In jail.
As you've probably guessed, religion and I don't get along. I think it all depends on what resonates with someone personally though. If the thought of a deity works for you, then that's okay. For me, a lover of history, religion defies logic purely because humans have existed for thousands of years before any of it. Christianity dates back to the first century, AD, some 4000 years after the earliest confirmed human civilisation, and if you took the entirety of Earths existence and compacted it all into a single 24 hour day, humans didn't show up to the party until 11:58pm. It just doesn't make sense that after thousands of years of existence a human just happens to stumble upon the absolute truth, and it just so happens to involve doing what that person says or risk going to Hell.
The ceiling of the church is mostly still there.
Some of it's here too.
This image is pretty terrible because the sun is literally situated right in front of the chapel, likely a deliberate choice of architectural positioning, so that the chapel would be flooded with light during a service.
What a curious contraption. This doesn't seem to be part of the original chapels seating. In fact, it looks like someone has used pieces of the church pews to build a little box den, complete with little steps leading up to it.
Isn't that cute? I wonder what we'll find inside the box!
Oh...
The pews are numbered. This is actually a remnant of an outdated practice where churchgoers were allocated seats based on social rank. The front pews would be reserved for higher ranking members of society like, for example, Maggie Thatcher and her hot grand daughter Amanda, while towards the back of the church would be the poor people, the eccentrics, and me staring longingly at the back of Amandas lovely head.
Numbered pews fell out of practice in the late 1800s, and now anyone can park their buttocks wherever they want in a church, but many old chapels still have the numbers on them, as a reminder that this religion that talks of a kind, loving, perfect God is still ruled over by a bunch of flawed fleshbag humans and their silly intolerances, who are each just as gassy as the rest of us.
There's an old organ here, and I was quite surprised to see that the keys are wooden. I've never actually seen an organ with wooden keys before, and it's a massive shame that it's been trashed when it could have been saved and preserved.
Amongst the rubble of the former organ is this little chunk of writing which reveals that this was built by John W Reed, a London-based manufacturer of organs and pianos in the late 1800s.
John W Reed didn't move to London until 1861, and based on what can be found on the 1871 census and his sons christening records of 1877, he made his career change into Piano manufacturing during that period.
However, in 1881, he changed his business title, and all his products had written on them "J W Reed & Sons" instead of simply "John W Reed Manufacturers."
This means that this poor, trashed church organ dates back to anywhere between 1877 and 1881. It's a bloody antique! It's a treasure! And here it is, wrecked and strewn across the floor of a chapel that's practically ready to strew itself across the floor with it.
There's a nice little, oddly modern looking candle stick to end on.
That's all I've got. I love churches and chapels. Regardless of my religious opinions, everywhere mattered to someone once, and this is very apparent when one looks at religious sites which were once packed with people. This ruin had meaning once, but now it doesn't, and will likely collapse on itself in the not too distant future, and that is kinda sad.
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