The Mystery of the Missing Medieval Churches

I've been losing my mind recently. During a bout of intense focus on a topic for a future video, I found something strange. Or rather, it's something that I didn't find. This was a church called St. Dwinwyn's in Wales. It didn't always used to look like that of course, unless the builders were feeling lazy that century, but this is the form that it and many other churches have survived in, and this fact became much more pertinent to me recently. I was reading through a 16th century manuscript, a hobby that I'm told is strange and unnecessary, and I encountered one of my favourite things. A giant list from a long time ago. In this case, it was a list of seemingly every church in Wales in the year 1566. Riveting, I know, but hear me out, because a few of these names were very strange. Most of them are still around and have the same name today as they did back then. A few of them have had a bit of a rebrand, some of them lie in ruins disused, but some of them turned up absolutely nothing. As a consequence, I found myself diving more and more into old maps and old journals, itineraries from the 1500s and theories in books from a hundred years ago, desperately trying to find out what were, to me, a series of churches that had seemingly completely fallen through the cracks of time. You may be thinking, who cares about any of this? And that's exactly my point. Because some churches left ruins, some only left their name, and others left absolutely nothing at all. This is the mystery of the missing churches. My research focused on one area in particular, the island of Unismon, or Anglesey in English. It has a rich history and a huge number of churches giving far more chances for some to fall through the cracks. Also, it was the first county on the list, so where else would I start? And in this county, I ended up with six churches that were completely unaccounted for. No modern village, no obvious historic site, nothing. Where did they go? Luckily for you and for my sanity, I did eventually find some answers, although it wasn't easy and some were far more concrete than others. One of these tenuous structures was the missing Kappel Agenon, chapel of the something. I don't know, and neither did anyone else. From what I could find, there is only one other source that has ever mentioned this place, The Church Plate of Radnorshire, a book title that I'm shortening by 37 words. This author seemed to suggest that it's related to someone named Cynon, a name that's found in a whole bunch of places, none of which are on Unismon, so this doesn't look that promising. There aren't any historical sites bearing this name either, nor the similar Welsh name Cynan. Once the one and only historical source had been used up, I was forced to take dramatic action, looking at every major church in the area to see if any of them were absent from the list. A long task that gave me the grand result of no. Okay, so I had one more idea. Once the first two wells of information were dried up, I was forced to migrate like a thirsty herd of bison to the great plains of Checking Every Chapel in the area too, of which the Welsh archaeological catalogue Coflain listed 94. A task that was made even harder with the realisation that some places only came up if you searched the Welsh word Capel. And after a long time searching, I finally found a candidate. You see, a lot of names in this document are quite corrupted, which we'll see more later, and I began to think that part of this mysterious name Ginn could be the Welsh word Gwyn, white. There is a Capel Gwyn in the area too. Unfortunately, this list was compiled in the 1500s and this Capel Gwyn was built approximately 83,000 days later. However, I did find one more place, another Capel Gwyn that was built on the site of an older chapel named Gwyngennau. Gwyngen to Ginnon isn't that impossible, especially considering some of the in here, and I couldn't find anything that seemed closer to this name, but I do wish that this could be more concrete. As you can see from the site, it isn't vacant, but the buildings standing here today are a mere representation, a cruel homunculus feigning to be descended from the real Capel Gwyngennau, whose walls have long crumbled and whose name may have only survived in an incredibly unintelligible and corrupted form, destined to be forgotten by the very people living atop its corpse. Okay, so it's not that dramatic, but the original historic site is sadly no longer present, and has presumably been buried under this house built over a century ago. I wish after all of this searching that I could have had something of the site to see, but I'm sure I'll be fine. The Capel again on sadly wasn't the only church destined to be built upon, as I would soon find that another missing structure, Llanannau Saint, had suffered the same fate. Despite the name indicating that the church was dedicated to an almost comical nine saints, it was still very difficult to find. Nothing seemed to exist with this name at all, no places and no 20th century books with 42 word titles either. I thought this was going to be a complete dead end, until I tried breaking the name apart. As I've already mentioned, several names in here have become very corrupted, and I figured there was a chance that a church of Nau Saint, two words, might exist, and that I might not have to check over a hundred churches and chapels again. And I was right. In 1910, a journal called A Camarador claimed that the 16th century Leyland's itinerary mentioned a place that we may find very interesting, Betus and Nau Saint in the north of Annesmont, right where the list said it should be. Even better, there's still a place named Betus here today. However, the site now contains a demolished structure that has been built upon by a farm. There's nothing left of it, again. No ruins, no site, just more buildings bearing a part of the name of the old chapel like wearing a suit made out of skin, leaving nothing for us to study. There is another problem though. Covline names this site Capel Gwenn here, and even if you can't speak Welsh, you should be able to see that these names aren't the same. Regardless, this is still the best candidate I could find. Even if it might not be this exact chapel, it's very likely that Betus and Nau Saint in northern Annesmont was somewhere near this Betus also in northern Annesmont. Rest in peace, the Church of the Nine Saints, the weirdest polycule to ever exist. Llanfyns, the worst name on this entire list. Fyns isn't a Welsh word, so not only was this church missing, not only were there no mentions of it anywhere, but unlike the Church of the Nine Saints, I didn't even know what its name was supposed to be. But this is fine, I'm sure it's just a corrupted word. Maybe it's a dinas, the Welsh word for a town or a fort. But I'm not sure. Now I just have to search for it. Luckily, I didn't have to cover the whole island. This list of churches is sorted by local divisions, and finding the neighbouring churches narrowed down the search area quite a bit, but almost comically, there were now zero place names featuring dinas in the area. It wasn't all lost though, because those neighbouring churches revealed an interesting pattern. If you look, we can see that they're listed in a north-easterly direction from St. Dunwyn's. So assuming that our mysterious Llanfyns followed this pattern, then it really should be somewhere in here. Finally, it came down to me just searching this part of the map for anywhere containing any element of this name. Dyns, thyn, dyn, and oh, here's one, Dynam. And wouldn't you know it? Within a wall in a nearby field, there are the Is this our mysterious Llandyns? A corruption of Llandynam? It's certainly possible, and it is again, the only suitable candidate I could find. For once, there are no abhorrent replacements of this structure, although there sadly aren't any pictures of the ruined doorway either. No doubt its skeletal remains were left here to mock me personally, the first structure to leave something behind and the first to be completely inaccessible. The doorway now looking out forever across the fields of Anusmon, holding the same gaze it's had for hundreds of years. I wonder if anyone knows it's on this list. No one else seems to have ever mentioned it. When was the last time someone called it by its proper name? I originally thought that this was the case for our next church too, as researching for this name on a map turned up absolutely nothing. I tried a few variations of the spelling, I looked for major churches that hadn't been listed yet since I wasn't in the mood to look through all of them again, and especially since Tlanboghudu was supposed to be in the same area as Capulaginnon, the first church that we looked at. Thankfully, with my sanity intact, I finally came across an actual mention of this place, and it was from a familiar face, S. Baring Gould, who appeared twice in my last video. In his book, The Lives of the British Saints, he makes the claim that this church is the chapel of Saint Bukhudu, and that apparently nobody knows anything about him at all. And that seems to check out, because finally having the correctly spelt church allowed me to find the site it used to be on, and it's disputed. Some earthworks remain of a different chapel today, although there was apparently an older building which could be one of three different churches. This arguably makes Bukhudu the most forgotten church on this list. There are some later remains on the site, it hasn't been built over, but we can't say for certain if it was even here, and there aren't any alternative suggestions. If Bukhudu wasn't here, then it's lost, potentially forever. I want to thank Mr. Baring Gould for helping out with this part of the video, let's see if he has anything to say. Thankfully for the next building, I wouldn't need any help from beyond the grave. San Adean does not exist, and seemingly it never has. How could I possibly reconcile such a difficult situation? Was this purposefully created just to mess with me? Was this entire list fake? How could I be certain that anything here was ever real? Maybe if I used all of my brain power, I could figure out the answer. Oh. As I did with the last churches, I checked for any important unclaimed buildings, and came up with nothing, which meant that I might have to go back to checking the chapels again, which were in the same area as two of our previous missing churches. Thankfully, before I had to read these for a third time, I came across the village of Aedirn in North Wales. Unfortunately, this was in the wrong part of North Wales, but this made me curious if there was another chapel dedicated to this St. Aedirn, and I was right. Because right here is the site of Aeglois Aedirn. There isn't anything left of the church on the surface today, but in 1971, an amazing discovery was made underground, of a large medieval cemetery featuring a few stone coffins, one of which was built out of a rock bearing an inscription to a man named Ercagni. I think it's quite ironic, really. We have nothing left of Llanadairn today, of the part above the surface that people went to that people recorded. Instead, the only remains are those who were buried underground, out of sight. And a man who was forgotten, whose gravestone was uprooted and reused to bury someone else, has become the memorable part of this entire location. Finally, we have the name that confused me the most, that weighed on my mind just enough to drive me to find not only it, but every missing church in this list. Llanfair-y-Nin-Trifor. This is only the tenth structure written down here, and up until this point, it had been pretty easy to find everything. But this was very different. Despite the lengthy name, nothing was coming up. Trifor didn't seem to exist, Nin was a word without meaning, and the only parts that were understandable were Llanfair-an, the Church of St. Mary at... somewhere. This name is a bit like if your dog started walking on its hind legs. You could recognize some of it, but the other parts? That's just a bit... off. I searched for some time but found nothing. No churches, no chapels, no ruins, no earthworks. It was like it didn't exist. So I left it. This place was the very last one I had to find, after hours and days of research and staring at maps, but I couldn't leave this almost complete. So after a while of nothing, I came up with an idea. What if the site was recorded in English as a chapel of St. Mary instead of Llanfair? And sure enough, once I looked for that, I found one right in the area of the other churches, a site labeled the Chapel of Ye Virgin Mary next to a farm called Tyndrifol, which in Welsh would be Llanfair-an Tyndrifol. There are no remains of it today, no ruins, no name, and nothing to remember it by. The building was torn down and the field was ploughed over. There isn't a single trace of anything. The only reason I even found it was because I purposefully went searching for it and it wasn't an easy task. In fact, the only reason I even knew it existed was because it happened to be listed in a 16th century manuscript I was reading. When was the last time someone went to this building? When were its last stones taken to build something new? When did someone last think of it or know it existed? These buildings were once incredibly important. They were centres of religion, served as boundaries for local administration, and thankfully, almost all of them survived. Almost. Because so many of them were unlucky. They were demolished, built upon, left in ruins to lie forgotten, buried, or just completely empty. As Ernest Hemingway said, every man has two deaths, when he's buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name. In the 15th century, a miracle was witnessed here at St. Nguyen's. A poet claimed that he saw Godi Merwan, the rising of the dead. Perhaps in remembering these names, we have performed our own version of this today. I've stared at so many maps during my research that I wouldn't be surprised if I woke up on a bed of them, if my walls turned into drawings of if my skin showed the sight of Llanfair and Tindrivel. I fear that my final resting place will be one of these missing churches. No matter where I'm actually buried, I know that I will find myself in a lost cemetery of a church that no one can remember, whose name has been forgotten for so long that no one will ever be able to say where I was finally laid to rest. Thank you for