St Cadoc's Church

St Cadoc’s Church stands at the cross-roads in the centre of Raglan village in Monmouthshire. Built originally in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the Clare and Bluet families, it was later rebuilt and expanded by the Herberts of Raglan Castle in the fifteenth century. A major restoration in the nineteenth century was carried out by Thomas Henry Wyatt. The church is built in the Decorated style and is a Grade II* listed building. The church is worth the journey for its long history and the noble families connected with it. Sir Joseph Bradney, the Monmouthshire antiquarian, recorded that the earliest church on the site may have been founded by Saint David, though Saint Cadoc became the patron saint. The Beaufort (North) Chapel contains three monumental tombs of the Earls of Worcester, whose remains lie in the crypt below. The church tower has only three faces because the benefactor, Miss Anna Maria Bosanquet, refused to pay for a fourth. Visitors find a fourteenth-century chancel and nave, a fifteenth-century west tower with unusual diagonal buttresses, and a sixteenth-century Beaufort Chapel. The font, returned to the church in the 1920s, is original. The churchyard holds the base and stump of a medieval cross. Inside, stained glass and the Lady Chapel date from Wyatt’s mid-Victorian restoration. The wagon-roof, revealed in 2016, shows the church’s medieval past.