St Michael

St Michael’s is an ancient double naved church in the small rural Flintshire town of Caerwys.

The church is dedicated to St Michael the Archangel. Its origins may be in the 8th century. It is located within half a mile of the ancient St Michael’s Well. The oldest part of the stone building is the tower begun in the early 1290s. It is a ‘battered’ tower, built like a fort. It was clearly a place of refuge and, possibly, a lookout. Today you can still see the holes for the draw posts used by local people to barricade themselves in when they needed refuge, the studded wooden door, and the sanctuary ring.

Inside an ornate arched recess in the south wall church lies the 13th century figure of a woman carved on a slab of grey sandstone. The effigy is said to depict Elizabeth Ferrers, who died around 1300. She was the widow of Dafydd ap Gruffydd, who was Prince of Wales until King Edward I executed him in 1283. In the exterior south wall is the memorial stone to Robert Evans, a boy Rector who died in 1582. In the north wall is the memorial to Revd John Lloyd, travelling companion of Thomas Pennant. Around the walls of the north nave there are antique carved panels. The oldest sections, with vine leaves and grapes are from the ceiling beams either side of the former medieval decorated canopy. The octagonal font and the altar date from the 1660s. Most of the memorial stones set into the wall of the north nave are earlier, including one from the 14th century to Gyean Vach.

One of the stained glass windows is assembled from fragments of a medieval stained glass window originally in the north nave. In the west wall there is the Eisteddfod Window, dedicated in 1959, which depicts King Henry VIII granting bards a charter for the pioneering eisteddfod held in Caerwys in 1523 The decorative oak altar screen was given by the Revd J Sinnett Jones in memory of his two sons and son in law, all killed in the First World War. There are memorials to the Caerwys fallen of two World Wars.