Llangennith
The historic landscape area of Llangennith roughly equates to the medieval Manors of Llangennith West Town and Priors Town, excluding areas of common land and the reclaimed land of Llangennith Moor to the west and the enclosed land of Kennexstone and Tankeylake to the east. The area of Llangennith (Llangenydd) was located within the Welsh medieval Cwmwd of Gwyr, within the Cantref of Eginog. During the reorganization of the post-medieval period the area formed part of the Hundred of Swansea, within the County of Glamorgan.
The medieval church of Saints Mary and Cennydd, which retains fabric from the twelfth–fourteenth centuries, was founded during the early medieval period, and dedicated to the 6th century St Cennydd. An Early Christian monument, probably part of a shaft of a ninth century cross, is preserved in the church. The churchyard is partly curvilinear, an indication of an early foundation. The church appears to have been the site of a clas church, which had reputedly been destroyed by Viking raiders in 986 AD. In the early 12th century the church, formerly occupied by a hermit, a certain Caradog was granted to the Abbey of St Taurinus at Evreux in Normandy by Henry de Beaumont (Bellomont), Earl of Warwick. Shortly after, a small dependent Benedictine priory cell was established that was separate and distinct from the church. Partly as a result of the end of the Glyndŵr rebellion, the priory was temporarily granted in 1406 to Ewenny Priory, though following the Crown’s seizure of alien priories in 1414, it was granted to All Souls’ College, Oxford, between 1440 and 1442. In 1838, the interest of All Souls’ College was transferred by Act of Parliament to Thomas Penrice, Esq, of Kilvrough.
The position of the monastic buildings has not been established; it is probable that they lay to the south, where the adjoining property retains the name of College Farm/House, and were connected to the church by a blocked south door. It is recorded in 1578 that the church was dedicated jointly to Our Lady and St Cennydd. The church was restored during the nineteenth century; the main restoration was to the design of JB Fowler in 1881–4, with contractors Messrs Rosser of Reynoldston. The tower was repaired, the nave floor raised by about 1.2 metres, monuments repositioned, new windows inserted, and the roofs rebuilt. The settlement of Llangennith, or Prior’s Town, acted as a parochial centre during the post-medieval period for an extensive parish covering approximately 1,329 acres.
Antiquarian references mention a small rectangular building called the Temple, located close to the Husk and an old lane leading to Llangenydd village, considered to have been a medieval chapel of ease or a cell of the Knights Templars.
The first OS map shows a small, nucleated settlement core located close to the boundary of the associated common. The settlement comprised the church within its graveyard and the adjacent ‘college’ to the south, with a short linear arrangement of cottages extending to either end of the former ‘Welcome to Town’ public house located opposite the church, south of the lane to West Town. North of the lane are Town House and its range of outbuildings to the southeast of the village ‘pound’ and the King’s Head public house. To the west lies a scatter of cottages and farms comprising West Town, loosely centred on the crossroads at Plenty Farm. This settlement, which had its own separate pound, a Wesleyan Methodist chapel (Zion Calvinistic Methodist Chapel), well (Bullen’s Well), and smithy, lay close to the boundary of the common. Routes radiated from the settlement cores at Priors Town and West Town, providing access to the common to the north and east.
A further settlement, now deserted, was located at Coety Green adjacent to Barraston Hall Farm. The buildings, constructed from conglomerate and red sandstone, display splayed windows with stone and wooden lintels, a fireplace in a gable wall, and a small oven, which may be of medieval origin. Tradition holds that Coety Green was abandoned in the seventeenth century due to plague contracted from the water supply, although documentary evidence suggests abandonment may not have occurred until the mid-nineteenth century.
Llangennith was once the most infamous, rough-and-ready village on the peninsula. Its villagers were known in the Gower dialect as ‘Llangenny Oxen’, always the first to rush to any shipwreck, particularly those in Rhossili Bay, and frequently feuding with neighbouring villages over any plunder they could find.
During World War I, when the British government introduced daylight saving, the villagers held a public meeting and voted to comply for a trial period of one month.
In the churchyard are buried the Gower folk singer Phil Tanner, who died in 1950, and Anthony Eyre DFC (1918–1946).