Penuel Chapel
- Baptist
Grade II listed
The beginnings of the Baptist movement in the
Llangors area go back to the mid seventeenth century.
In the 1640s dissenters met in the parish of Llanigon, to the
north of Llangors where itinerant preachers Walter Craddock and Vavasor
Powell led the prayers. Then
in 1650 the group was visited by John Miles, founder of the Baptist
Church in Wales. In 1657, as
a result of the so-called Propagation Act the rector of Llangors was
ejected and his living given to John Edwards who was an elder of
Llanwenarth Baptist Church and it is said that he preached often in
Llangors during 1656.
However following the restoration of the monarchy he was removed in
1660. There followed
difficult times for non-conformists and the Consistory Court records
indicate that during the 1660s
Roger Watkins of Llangors and Thomas John Prosser of Cathedine were
fined for not baptising their children.
Fortunately the persecution was relaxed with the introduction of
the Act of Toleration which allowed non-conformist meeting places and
their preachers to be licensed.
In
1831 the land on which a meeting-house then stood was purchased from
John Hodges Winslow, Esquire of Trellech Monmothshire, at a cost of
£143. The meeting house was
replaced by the present chapel in 1869 with the simple Round-Headed
style of the long-wall entry type, a typical vernacular architecture of
the period.
In
1895 the Rev Thomas Harris was appointed and he held the ministry for
this church for thirty-five years and by 1901 the membership had risen
to between fifty and sixty people with an all-time peak of seventy-five
in 1940. The weekly pattern
of meetings was Sunday morning and evening services with congregations
of between sixty and eighty, an afternoon Sunday school and a weekday
prayer meeting. Annual
functions such as anniversary services and harvest festivals were said
to be full to capacity and the summer outing, often to the seaside, was
a popular event. In 1951 the
church started a Young People’s Guild.
Clearly the church was meeting a social as well as a spiritual
need. However by 1984 there
are no records of Sunday school scholars and the membership had fallen
to nine and by 1995 it was down to four.
With such a small ageing membership and the burden of maintaining
a chapel building closure was inevitable and the last service took place
on 24th July 1996.
The
main seating within the chapel was terraced to make sure all members of
the congregation felt involved in the service.
They were bench type pews made of soft pine and decorated in best
oak varnish. Records show
that they were painted in 1933 when the chapel was redecorated at a cost
of £70. The baptism pool was
behind the pulpit and was covered with pine boards which made a raised
platform. There were steps
on either side, to walk in and to walk out of the pool.
It had a tap to fill the pool and a plug to let the water out.
By
1998 the chapel had fallen into disuse.
It was decommissioned, was sold on 24th June 1998 and
is now a private dwelling.
Following this the chapel was declared a Grade II listed building
with the stipulation that the exterior should retain its original
features.
The Church also owned a triangular plot of ground in
front of the chapel, known as the garden, which was sold to Mr D E East
in 1985 and later purchased by the current owners of the property.
It is thought that this piece of ground was once forming part of
the grounds of St. Paulinus Church.
The chapel never had a graveyard.