Church of St. Gastyn, Llangasty Talyllyn        Grade II* listed

This church has spectacular views over Llangors Lake and up to Mynydd Llangors and the prettiest little churchyard.  An early medieval origin is likely based on the church's location, recent archaeological work on the churchyard, and the unique dedication to St Gastyn.  This is the only church in the world dedicated to him.  He was never formally canonised and was one of the large number of holy men who kept the flame of the Christian faith burning in the western, Celtic, extremities of the British Isles and Brittany during the fifth and sixth centuries, while the rest of Western Europe was at the mercy of pagan invaders.  He was reputedly the tutor of the better known saint, Cynog who was one of the sons of Brychan, King of Brycheiniog.  This suggests that the first church was built on this site about 450 AD at the latest and makes it one of the earliest church sites in central Wales.

The church is recorded as 'Llangastey' in the Valor Ecclesiasticus of 1535 when it was worth relatively small amount of £4 18s 7d.  It is thought that the church was rebuilt in the mid-sixteenth century and that the tower was added about 1670.

By the early nineteenth century the church was in poor repair and was described in 1838 as 'a dark, ancient and decaying edifice'.  In the 1840's Robert and Frances Raikes came to Llangasty from Yorkshire.  Robert was a kinsman of the earlier Robert Raikes, one of the founders of the Sunday School Movement (it was thought the young children could be deterred from a life of crime if they were given basic and religious education on Sundays).  He had been at Oxford in the 1830s, where he had come under the influence of the Oxford Movement, to such an extent that he gave up his partnership in the family bank to look for a country parish in which he could put his Tractarian ‘High Church’ principles into practice.  The family were in fact wealthy merchants and bankers in Hull.  He found at Llangasty a suitable church and in 1847 he engaged a young architect, John Loughborough Pearson, to rebuild the church, and to build a church school near the entrance to the churchyard, and a house for himself at Treberfedd.  Pearson was already known to him as he had built a church for Raikes' mother in Yorkshire.  The stone for the 'big house' was quarried locally and the bathstone was transported along the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal, both may well have been used in the construction of the church.

The Raikes family continued to live in Treberfedd and to engage in activities of public good.  One member was instrumental in the re-introduction of the Red Kite into Powys.  Up the lane away from the lake was the Rectory, when it became no longer needed as such it was acquired by Miss Dorothy Raikes who re-opened it as the Llangasty Retreat House.

Pearson's work began in 1848 and a more or less completely rebuilt church followed incorporating some of the medieval stone particularly in the tower.  Furnishing was still in progress in 1856.  A metal screen (since removed) was designed to incorporate the re-used wooden wainscot.  The church has a massive west tower, narrower than the nave and slightly off centre, there is a narrower chancel beyond the nave with an organ chamber and vestry opening off the chancel and a south porch off the nave.  It is built in an Early-English - Victorian Gothic style predominantly red sandstone slabs with buff coloured sandstone dressing with bathstone windows.  The steep roof has stone tiles, grey ceramic ridge tile and cross finials.  There is a gargoyle just below the top of the tower.  It has been suggested that the jambs of the south door are re-used medieval stonework.

The interior of the church is a magnificent essay in Tracterian design, beginning with the medieval stoup in the porch through the stencilled walls of the nave, through the chancel screen to the marble-shafted triple east lancet windows - all suffused in the glow of richly hued glass.  Despite all this the church lacks the Early Victorian fussiness.

The fine nave roof has angular arch-bracing springing from corbels and scissor trusses, in the chancel there are painted scissor rafters.  The stencilled texts are below the wall plate level in the nave with more in the chancel which also has an elaborately decorated east wall.  The font is octagonal heavily moulded with quatrefoils, an inscription and base of three colonettes part marble, there is a wooden pyramidal font cover suspended above.

There are cusped communion rails round an oak altar table with a floor of elaborately patterned Minton tiles; a delicately scrolled wrought iron parclose screen; the pulpit is in oak with blind tracery.  The low screen made from pieces of the sixteenth century screen with panels possibly belonging to the loft parapet being unusually carved in the solid in the form of sharply pointed and serrated pinnacles with vinework and quatrefoils above and vine-train below.  The oak box organ by Joseph W Walker of London (1850) with decorated pipes with an Iron screen on north side of organ vestry.

There is a wall carving of Mary holding baby Jesus.

A peal of four bells hang on a substantial oak frame in the tower, one bell was cast in 1931 by Gillert & Johnston of Croydon, one by Henry Williams in 1714, one by John Taylor & Co 1878, one by John II Pennington 1674.

Stained glass