Llansantffraed

The poet, the church and the valley

The grave people come to find sits beside a yew in the churchyard of St Ffraed (also recorded as St Bridget), on a hillside above the River Usk. It is a broad stone slab carrying a Latin epitaph and a crest of three bonneted faces, and it belongs to Henry Vaughan, the metaphysical poet who signed himself the Silurist and was known as the Swan of Usk. He lived and worked here as a physician for about forty years and was buried in 1695. His twin brother Thomas, also a writer, was rector of the church.

Llansantffraed is barely a village at all: a church, a country house and the flat green floor of the Middle Usk valley, with the Brecon Beacons rising to the south and the foothills of Mynydd Epynt to the north. The practical business of a stay happens about a mile away, in Talybont-on-Usk, and the two places are stitched together by the towpath of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal.

Talybont provisions and the Henry Vaughan Walk

Talybont is where you buy things. Talybont Stores is the shop, cafe and post office in one, run by Shailesh and Bhavna Karavadra beside the canal, doing Indian food and takeaway alongside cafe lunches and fish and chips. There are three pubs within reach. The Star Inn sits right on the canal, a Grade II-listed early-nineteenth-century building with separate stone-floored rooms, log fires and a small central bar; the public bar keeps a red quarry-tile floor and a mirrored bar-back thought to date from about 1930, and CAMRA has singled the interior out for national historic interest. It pours cask ales from independent breweries, welcomes dogs, and has a large riverside garden reached down a steep slope to the canal towpath. The White Hart, an old coaching inn in the centre of the village, has a bar and a restaurant and lets well-behaved dogs sit at the front or on the canal side at the back. A third, the Royal Oak, is family-run at Pencelli, a walk or cycle further along the towpath, with a garden by the canal.

The Henry Vaughan Walk is the reason most people set out. It is a 5.3-kilometre circle from the canal bank at Talybont, rising no more than fifty metres, through meadows, hedgerows and riverside to St Ffraed's church and the grave, with interpretation posts linking the ground to Vaughan's poems. Walkers wanting more can follow the former Brecon-to-Merthyr railway line onto the Brinore Tramroad, with an extra kilometre reaching Talybont Reservoir; keep dogs on leads near livestock. Back in Talybont, Henderson Hall has a playground, playing field, community orchard, EV charging and a large car park.

Fabric, glass and memorials

The church itself was rebuilt in 1884-85 by the Rhayader architect Stephen W. Williams, in Early English style, for J. P. Gwynne Holford of Buckland. Williams kept a medieval stoup in the porch and a window head dated 1626 in the vestry; inside there is a medieval fluted font, a Ward & Hughes Ascension window of 1885, angel corbels and two bells, one cast in 1676 and one in 1997. In 1897 the antiquarian Gwenllian Morgan raised money to repair Vaughan's grave, which meant removing and filling an ash pit; the fund could not at first afford the seven pounds asked for railings. The yew beside the slab is the tree in Siegfried Sassoon's poem "At the Grave of Henry Vaughan".

Road, rail and bus connections

Getting here is straightforward. Llansantffraed lies just off the A40 between Brecon and Abergavenny; the nearest station is Abergavenny, fifteen miles from Talybont and step-free, and the X43 bus runs between the two towns through Talybont, though it's worth checking the current timetable before you travel. Brecon, ten kilometres north-west, has the full range of shops.

Evensong for Henry Vaughan

Each year, on the Sunday nearest the date of his death, a choral evensong is sung in the small church above the river, and the poems are read aloud among the people who came to hear them.