Choral Evensong in the Undercroft of Neath Abbey ruins

Cadw kindly granted permission for Afon Nedd Ministry Area to host a Choral Evensong in the Undercroft of the ruins of Neath Abbey. The acoustics are truly wonderful.

Neath Abbey occupies a special place in the history of Wales, having been a major ecclesiastical monastic site, an impressive Tudor secular house and a centre of early industrial activity.

Successive Welsh rebellions damaged the abbey and its estates, but it recovered more strongly on each occasion and reached its greatest and most developed heights immediately before its suppression in 1539, when John Leland judged it to be the ‘fairest abbey in all Wales’..

In the early twentieth century the site was extensively excavated before being placed into state care in 1944 and state ownership in 1949.

The dormitory under croft (monastic day room) is one of the most important and memorable monastic rooms in Wales. It is noteworthy not only because of the room’s pure and beautiful mid-thirteenth-century architecture, but also because it contains: One of the largest and finest collections of medieval floor tiles in Wales (c. 1340) displaying an important array of heraldry, tracery patterns and other motifs; An important assemblage of carved stone from the site including two fine vaulting bosses from nave of the Decorated abbey church and an early medieval inscribed stone (8th/9th and 9th/10th century) that may provide evidence of earlier ecclesiastical activity on the site; An effigy, thought to be Abbot Adam of Carmarthen, under whom the rebuilding of the abbey church began around 1280.

Видео Choral Evensong in the Undercroft of Neath Abbey ruins канала Diocese of Llandaff