Peter Stanford’s new book tells the history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland through twenty buildings and spaces. The fourth to be featured in our series is the Church of St Melangell’s, in Pennant Melangell, Powys

At Llangynog on the southern flank of Berwyn Mountains in north-east Wales, a turning off the main road winds through the flat bottom of the sparsely populated valley of the River Tanat to St Melangell’s Church. A low, plain, stone Norman building from the twelfth century, put up as William the Conqueror’s successors extended their hold on hitherto fiercely independent Wales, it contains what is said to be the finest Romanesque shrine in northern Europe.