being more than twenty feet from the ground: the walls always thick, never under three feet: the original windows very few in number, and those being only circular-headed loopholes, without any ornament whatever: every thing being exceedingly plain, ornamentation of any kind being evidently beyond the means of the simple people. A bell-gable almost always at the west end of the church (there being only three or four old steeples in the whole island): the gables carefully topped with crosses, supported upon canopied trifoliated bases, terminating the coping of the gables; the font always at the west end of the nave, of the simplest form, and generally of high antiquity: no side aisles, no triforia, no clerestories (except at Beaumarais, Holyhead, and perhaps one or two more places); hardly a pillar or shaft to be met with in the whole district.
After such a description of the general character of these churches, it may well be asked what interest they can possess? It is true that they have little or no architectural value, but they have much archæological interest; they form a numerous and unbroken series of village churches, from perhaps the ninth or tenth century (probably much earlier) down to the fifteenth; and they are untouched: they are as they were built, and they are likely to remain so, until they fall to pieces in the lapse of future years. Though, therefore, they cannot compete with any of the grander edifices of the middle ages, they supply types of the humbler buildings used by a peasantry almost unchanged at the present day; and they are therefore entitled to consideration by all who enquire into the archæological remains of this country. Unless (which is very unlikely) the condition of the population should change very much,—they are still so simple and happy that no change in their worldly wealth is at all desirable;—it is to be hoped that these primitive buildings will be allowed to retain all the quaintness of their grey and venerable antiquity. Repairs they will undoubtedly need, but modifications few, improvements none.
The survey of all the parochial churches being as yet incomplete, it would be premature to pronounce an opinion as to which is the oldest ecclesiastical building still existing on the island: but that which is the most interesting, and at the same time one of the oldest and least injured, is the conventual church of Penmon, with its dependent buildings. The monastic establishment of Penmon, founded by St. Seiriol in
