Partrishow

A Church Above the Valley

The rood loft inside St Issui's church was carved from Irish oak around 1500, its screen running with dragons, wyverns and twisting foliage. Robert Scourfield and Richard Haslam, continuing Pevsner's survey of the buildings of Wales, called it "the most perfect and elegant rood loft now standing in the kingdom." It is reason enough to make the climb up to Partrishow, and the climb is part of the point: the church stands alone on a natural shelf cut into a steep, south-facing hillside above the Grwyne Fawr valley, reached by a winding single-track lane where parking is limited.

What Partrishow has is the church, a holy well and the hillside, with long views to the south-east.

Centuries Inside St Issui's

Inside, the building shows its age in pieces. An inscribed eleventh-century font sits near what may be a Norman nave; a chancel, a fifteenth-century porch and a side chapel were added across later medieval centuries, and W. D. Caröe repaired the whole thing in 1908 and 1909. There are two early stone altar slabs, faded wall paintings, and a parish chest hollowed from a single tree trunk, bound in iron and fitted with three separate locks. On one wall is a historic Doom figure, an eight-foot painted skeleton carrying a sickle. The side chapel, the eglwys-y-bedd, has an altar set over Issui's reputed grave.

A short way down the slope is St Issui's Well, a rubble-walled spring where a hermit is said to have kept his cell before a passing traveller murdered him. The village's older name, Merthyr Issui, is traditionally linked to the killing, and pilgrims came here for the water's reputed healing.

Proper Walks and Food Beyond

The walking is the other reason to come, and it is proper walking rather than a village stroll. The St Thomas Way circular from the church runs 6.5 miles over about three and a half hours, with steep pitches, stiles and narrow paths; it passes the Tabernacle Baptist Chapel of 1837, the Revenge Stone where Morgan ap Owen killed the Norman lord Richard de Clare in 1135, and the Iron Age fort at Twyn y Gaer. A longer eight-mile route from Pont Cadwgan climbs 524 metres to the Crug Mawr trig point and drops back past the church. Neither suits a buggy or a wheelchair. The woods along the way hold sessile oak, ash, wild cherry, silver birch, rowan, hazel and white willow.

You eat elsewhere. Down at Forest Coal Pit, below the village, a farm raises Large Black and Duroc pigs in woodland and pasture for homemade sausages and home-smoked bacon. For a pub you drop to the Red Lion at Llanbedr, family-run with an open fire and home-cooked food, or drive on to Crickhowell, where the Bear Hotel has served food since 1432 and turns out Welsh faggots with onion gravy, slow-braised lamb shank with spring-onion mash, and Welsh rarebit on Alex Gooch bread.

The Abergavenny Approach

Abergavenny, about eight kilometres south, is the nearest railway station, on the Welsh Marches line with step-free access and a taxi rank; from there the lane is yours to find.

Coins by the Well

Near the well stands a tree studded with coins pressed into its bark by visitors. None of the coins predates decimalisation.