Llanllugan Abbey

Llanllugan Abbey was a Cistercian monastery for nuns in Llanllugan, Powys, Wales. It stood between two streams of the Rhiw in a quiet valley. The abbey held estates at Hydan grange and Cowney, and drew income from churches granted by bishops in the 13th century. It began as a dependency of Strata Marcella Abbey, a Cistercian house of monks. Welsh princes supported such monasteries to keep them separate from Norman foundations. The abbey appears in Welsh literature through a poem by Dafydd ap Gwilym. In ‘Cyrchu Lleian’, the poet sends a messenger to ‘proud Llanllugan’ to lure a nun into a forest grove. Records from 1377 list only four nuns and an abbess, though Dafydd’s poem hints at sixty. The Welsh Cistercian nunneries rarely housed more than a dozen nuns each. The old monastery church still serves as Llanllugan’s parish church. The exact site of the abbey buildings is unknown; they may have stood in a meadow 200 metres south of the church. The abbey’s legacy survives in its stone church and the story of Dafydd’s poem.