Churches of the British Isles

The location of the lost Wringworthy Old Chapel remains unknown. HER marks a site to the north-west of the A387 road here, opposite Bolventor Lane and a few kilometres south of Bylane End (above). Wringworthy Cottages and Wringworthy Farm are shown here from across the valley. This settlement is first recorded in 1201. The name is English and refers to a cheese press farm. Copeland in 1947 records a medieval domestic chapel which was attached to Wringworthy House.

Grace Community Church, Morval, is on the west side of the A387, about seven hundred metres south of Bolventor Lane. The congregation formed in 1994 thanks to a local Methodist preacher who dissented from denomination decisions. He began meetings in a local school with about a hundred and fifty people. Grace Church was created in 1996 on an agricultural site, and is housed inside a former potato barn as part of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches.

The Church of St Wenna sits to the west of the road through Morval, a little under a kilometre to the south of Grace Community Church (above). There has been a church here since AD 504, named after Wenna, one of the children of Brychan of Brycheiniog. In the sixth century she travelled to Cornwall with her siblings. Following the Norman invasion of 1066, the church presumably was rebuilt in the present slate-stone and granite, in a traditional cruciform style.

If anything of an older church remained at that time - presumably largely a wooden construction - those details have since been erased. Sir Humphrey de Locksore in 1244 presented the church to the priory of St Germans (see 'related links'). Money was given in 1441 for building the fine three-stage bell-tower. The church was also widened in the 1400s to finalise today's structure. It underwent a full and complete restoration in 1661 by the Buller family of Morval House.

Trenode School Chapel sits to the north-west of Widegates on the A387, due east of Wringworthy. The school sits a little way off the north side of the A387. This was a single-cell chapel with a late 1800s or early 1900s cross-wing addition at the liturgical west end, connected by a small porch. Built in 1872 in memory of Rev J Buller Kitson, Kellys 1902 notes it as a small school which was also used as a chapel, supported by the vicar. It was converted fully into a school in 1960s.

Five photos on this page copyright © Derek Harper, Roger Geach (two), Tony Atkin, and BB via Geograph, reused under a cc licence, and one copyright © Grace Church.