The Ports, Past and Present project aimed to encourage tourists to explore the port towns connecting Wales and Ireland, rather than simply passing through on their way from one country to another.
I was first drawn to visit Holyhead many years ago to see the medieval church located on the site of a Roman fort, and I made subsequent visits to see stained glass at the town while gathering material for Stained Glass from Welsh Churches. As part of my contribution to the ports project I wrote and produced a guide to the stained glass from places of worship in Holyhead and at two other churches in the Benefice of Bro Cybi (Holy Island), Rhoscolyn and Trearddur Bay.
The importance of churches as a focus for faith tourism was highlighted in Wales by the Experiencing Sacred Wales project (2019–21), run by the National Churches Trust. As my advisory work for this project overlapped with my time working on Ports, Past and Present, it seemed appropriate to help local residents appreciate the stained glass in the town and encourage the idea that churches and their stained glass could offer a draw for visitors.
The booklet was launched on 1 July 2023 with a guided walking tour around all of the places in Holyhead where there was pictorial stained glass. Starting at the Maritime Museum, where two windows from the now demolished Church of St Seiriol are now preserved, we proceeded to the medieval church dedicated to St Cybi, the Catholic church and the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist Chapel, prior to a talk at Ucheldre Centre.
Apart from some coloured tracery lights in the nave of St Cybi’s, which probably date to the mid-nineteenth century, one of the windows from St Seiriol’s at the Maritime Museum appears to be the earliest pictorial stained glass in the town.
The window looked like it was the work of Heaton, Butler & Bayne, and this was confirmed by my discovery of a very similar window that I had tentatively attributed to them in Fowey. The window was listed and attributed to the firm by Michael Swift on his Cornish Stained Glass site, and securely dated to 1876.
The window at Holyhead was given in memory of Vice Admiral Charles Frederic Schomberg, who died in September 1874, and is therefore probably of a similar date. The two windows show Christ teaching from a boat and Christ calming the storm, both appropriate to churches found by the sea. The two windows make an interesting comparison with each other, showing how the designs of the two scenes were adapted for windows of different heights. The Fowey window has a brighter colouring suggestive of their earlier work, with strong blues for the skies at the tops of the windows, and greater use of yellow ochres and bright reds, while the more subdued colouring of the Holyhead window is more like their stained glass later in the 1870s and 80s.
The booklet includes stained glass by many others including C.E. Kempe, Morris & Co., James Powell & Sons, J. Wippell & Co., Christopher Charles Powell, Edward Payne and concludes with the impressive set of recent windows by Alan Davis at the Catholic church. These rank among the best sets of new windows for a church anywhere in Wales, with imaginative designs interpreting biblical themes rendered in a modern painterly style. The windows were a fortunate discovery that I made just in time to include in Stained Glass from Welsh Churches, necessitating a long last-minute day trip to photograph them for the book. The new little book on the glass of Holy Island provided a welcome opportunity to illustrate a different window with another detail on the back cover.
The front cover has a detail of the window given in memory of William Owen Stanley at St Cybi’s, made by Morris & Co. in 1897, and the subject of earlier comment on this blog nearly nine years ago.
I have written more on the patronage of the Stanleys in Holyhead for the Ports, Past and Present website.
Stained Glass from Welsh Churches 