Qualla: St Asaph Cathedral

St Asaph Cathedral: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JK the Unwise, CC BY-SA 3.0. Bishop William Morgan finished the work in 1588, the year the Spanish Armada sailed and the year the Welsh language nearly stopped being a literary language at all. He translated the entire Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Welsh - the first complete translation - and in doing so saved his mother tongue from a slow drift into folk-tale and farm vocabulary. Morgan later became Bishop here at St Asaph, and his Bible still sits on public display inside the cathedral he served. The building itself is small enough to walk across in under a minute and old enough to have been burned twice. It is the smallest of Britain's ancient cathedrals, and the most consequential single book in the history of the Welsh language was made by the man buried in its choir.

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Image: JK the Unwise | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Asaph Cathedral: Asa and Kentigern

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ввласенко, CC BY-SA 3.0. The story begins in the sixth century with Saint Kentigern, the Scottish missionary monk who founded a religious community on this site sometime around the year 560. He left it under the care of a young pupil named Asa - also called Asaph - who was the grandson of Pabo Post Pryda...

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Image: Ввласенко | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Asaph Cathedral: Built Twice, Wounded Often

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tyssil, CC BY-SA 4.0. The cathedral you see now is mostly thirteenth century in plan, finished slowly through the disturbances that followed. Owain Glyndŵr's rebellion swept through in the early fifteenth century and left part of the cathedral a roofless ruin for seventy years. The reign of Henry Tudo...

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Image: Tyssil | CC BY-SA 4.0

St Asaph Cathedral: William Morgan's Bible

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Snapshots Of The Past, CC BY-SA 2.0. Of the bishops who served here, William Morgan looms largest. Born in Penmachno about 1545, educated at Cambridge, Morgan spent decades translating the scriptures into Welsh from the original languages - not as a scholarly exercise but as a parish necessity. Welsh-speaking congre...

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Image: Snapshots Of The Past | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Asaph Cathedral: Geoffrey, Mathias, and the Choir

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiger, CC BY-SA 2.0. Other bishops have passed through. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the twelfth-century cleric whose Historia Regum Britanniae gave the medieval world its King Arthur, served as Bishop of St Asaph from 1152 to 1155. War and unrest kept him from ever visiting his see. Eight centuries later, ...

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Image: Tiger | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Asaph Cathedral: The Smallest Cathedral

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eirian Evans, CC BY-SA 2.0. St Asaph the place is sometimes described as the smallest city in Britain - a status granted formally in 2012 to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II - and the cathedral at its centre is among the smallest of Britain's ancient cathedrals. There is no gothic stretch, no ...

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Image: Eirian Evans | CC BY-SA 2.0