Qualla: Caldey Island

Caldey Island: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The monks of Caldey make perfume. They distil it from the gorse, lavender and wildflowers that grow on their 538-acre island, bottle it in small glass vials with the abbey's name on the label, and sell it to the tourists who arrive by ferry from Tenby every morning during the summer. They also make chocolate and shortbread. This is how a Trappist Cistercian community on a Welsh island finances itself in the twenty-first century. The same Catholic order that historically practised silence and manual labour now also runs an online shop, and the monks have agreed, since 2024, to a strict no-touch policy for visitors.

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caldey Island: Saint Pyr and the Vikings

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JKMMX, CC BY-SA 3.0. The recorded religious history of Caldey runs back to the sixth century, when a saint named Pyr is described as abbot of the monastery around the year 500 in the Life of St Samson. The Welsh name Ynys Bŷr, the Island of Pyr, comes directly from him. The English name comes from la...

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Image: JKMMX | CC BY-SA 3.0

Caldey Island: Bones in the Caves

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Downer, CC BY-SA 2.0. The story goes back further than any of the monks. Three caves on the island, Nanna's Cave, Potter's Cave, and Ogof-yr-Ychen, the Ox Cave, have yielded human remains stretching back to the Upper Palaeolithic. In Ogof-yr-Ychen the bones of people who lived between 7,590 and 5,710 ...

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Image: Chris Downer | CC BY-SA 2.0

Caldey Island: Belgian Trappists in Edwardian Wales

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. The current Caldey Abbey is a strange and beautiful building, an Arts and Crafts experiment finished in 1910 by the architect John Coates Carter for an Anglican Benedictine community. Carter gave it white roughcast walls, red-tiled roofs, a tapering church tower with primitive cr...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0

Caldey Island: A Reckoning

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chaosdruid, Public domain. The island's history also contains decades of serious harm. Multiple cases of child sexual abuse linked to Caldey have come to light since 2011. A monk named Thaddeus Kotik was found in a 2017 civil case to have abused six girls on the island between 1972 and 1987. Two other men ...

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Image: Chaosdruid | Public domain

Caldey Island: The Caldey Stone and the Working Island

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 4.0. Near the abbey stands the Caldey Stone, a sixth- or seventh-century inscribed pillar bearing both an Ogham inscription and a Latin one, one of the rare bilingual stones from the Celtic Christian period in Wales. It is among the most significant early medieval monuments in the cou...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 4.0