Qualla: St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo

St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The church is small, set back from the village, cross-shaped, built of grey rubble masonry with a slate roof and a stone bellcote at one end. From outside, it looks like one of a hundred small Welsh country churches. Inside, beside the chancel, hangs a late thirteenth-century bell with the impression of a coin of King Edward I pressed into the metal — an accidental dating stamp left by a medieval bellmaker. In the churchyard outside lie the dead of one of Britain's worst maritime disasters, and the rector who buried them.

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo: From the Sixth Century

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Talsarnau Times, CC BY-SA 3.0. Tradition says Gallgo founded the church here in the early sixth century, which would make it — in the words of the historian Geraint Jones — 'one of the oldest Christian sites in Anglesey'. Gallgo was a son of St Caw, a king from somewhere in what is now southern Scotland, and a...

Image: Talsarnau Times | CC BY-SA 3.0

St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo: October 1859: The Wreck on the Doorstep

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The Royal Charter, a steam clipper coming home to Liverpool from Melbourne with hundreds of passengers and crew aboard, was driven onto the rocks just north of Moelfre on the night of 25-26 October 1859 by the worst storm to hit the Irish Sea in the nineteenth century. More than ...

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo: The Cost of That Work

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. Stephen Roose Hughes did not survive the experience for long. He died in 1862, at the age of forty-eight, three years after the Royal Charter went down. His brother Hugh Robert Hughes, rector of the neighbouring parish of Penrhosllugwy, had shared the worst of the work and died w...

Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo: Architecture and the Cluttered Centuries

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Greig, CC BY-SA 2.0. The cross-shaped plan dates from the late medieval rebuilding. You enter through a porch on the north side, where the doorway has been built from reused older stones — a small piece of medieval recycling that hints at how many earlier buildings have stood on this site. Inside, th...

Image: Ian Greig | CC BY-SA 2.0

St Gallgo's Church, Llanallgo: Quiet Sundays and the Graves Outside

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Keith Williamson, CC BY-SA 2.0. St Gallgo's is one of four churches in the combined benefice of Llaneugrad and Llanallgo with Penrhosllugwy with Llanfihangel Tre'r Beirdd — a long Welsh phrase for a small Welsh ministry. The poet Dafydd Trefor, recorded as rector here in 1504, is buried in the churchyard. So is...

Image: Keith Williamson | CC BY-SA 2.0