Penuel Baptist Chapel
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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.