St Beuno's Church, Bettws Cedewain

Haslam in his description of the church remarks on it as having one of the few Perpendicular church towers in Montgomeryshire. The building history of the tower must be much more complex than this. As noted by Pennant, the wooden steeple or campanile can be attributed to the period before 1531, when John ap Meredyth was vicar, but Eisel, in his study of church bells in Montgomeryshire, notes that two of the earlier bells were recast in 1630 and that modifications to the bell frame were probably made at that time. The Tower must have been extensively re-built in the earlier 18th century, as the watercolour by John Ingleby shows that it had Hanoverian type arched windows, similar to those in…