St Thomas’ Church, St Dogmaels
This Victorian church, beside the ruins of St Dogmaels Abbey, contains a stone inscribed with Latin and Ogham. Part of the building is visible on the left in the drawing by Henri Gastineau (1791-1876), courtesy of Ceredigion Archives.
St Thomas’ Church was built 1848-52 on the site of an earlier church, which was also dedicated to St Thomas. A different saint, Dogmael or Dogfael, was an earlier dedicatee. A 12th-century text refers to the church of sancti Dogmaelis.
Inside the church you can see the ‘Sagranus stone’ (pictured). It was inscribed in the 5th or early 6th century with the Latin words SAGRANI FILI CUNOTAMI. The same dedication to Sarganus, son of Cunotamus, is shown in Ogham, an ancient script which used notches. Linguists knew little of the Ogham alphabet until they realised that here the Latin and Ogham have the same meaning. This helped them to decipher Ogham inscriptions which have no corresponding Latin.
Some of the monuments on the walls inside pre-date the current church. One tablet commemorates Elizabeth Letitia Jones, who died in 1833, and her husband David, a Lieutenant in the Royal Marines who died in 1822, aged 34.
Inside and outside are memorials to men who died at sea, including Captain John Lewis of Castle Street, Cardigan. He died, aged 57, while sailing home from Pensacola, Florida, in command of the Liverpool-registered barque Cambay on 10 September 1882.
Also commemorated inside is Fishguard-born Captain David Jones of Marine Villa, St Dogmaels. He died in 1909, aged 60, while his ship Edenmore, of Greenock, near Glasgow, was sailing around Cape Horn. A huge wave swept David from the chart room to the cabin, killing him instantly. He left a wife, three sons and a daughter. The same wave washed a crew member overboard and demolished the ship’s steering wheel, binnacle and chart house.
On the Evans family monument outside the church you can see an inscription in memory of Evan Evans. He was chief officer of the Liverpool-registered Hawarden Castle, described in the Australian press as “an old trader to the colonies”. All 22 crew members perished when the iron-built ship sank while carrying coal from Newcastle, New South Wales, to Valparaiso, Chile, in 1890. Evan was 25 years old.
Postcode: SA43 3JH View Location Map
Website of Ceredigion Archives
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