Llanfair Clydogau / Llanfair Clywedogau / Llanvair Clydogau / Llanvair Clywedogan / Llanvair Clywedogau / Llanvair y Clywedogau

Meyrick (1808) mentions the church and its font: "a round bason, with rude carving of men's heads, one at each angle." The entry for this church in Evans (1914) reports: "Font Bowl, bearing the Evangelistic symbols (see Maesdir, sub Lampeter), mounted on a four-corner pedestal of bricks". Described and illustrated in Tyrrell-Green (1928: 64): "The interesting font-bowl at Llanfair-Clydogau (Cardigan) [...] was at one time disused and cast away, but has been recovered and, after having been kept for some time within the church, is now again set up for its sacred use, though the plain square pillar of white brick upon which it stands is the reverse of beautiful. The bowl, which has evidently experienced exposure and rough usage, bears at about equal distances representations of strange-looking figures. These have been misunderstood and wrongly described by those who have written upon the antiquities of Cardiganshire" [a footnote referred to here reads: "Meyrick (History and Antiquities of Cardigan, p. 221) and Eyre Evans (Cardiganshire, p. 216) had no idea of the meaning of the figures [cf. supra]. Horsfall Turner (Walks and Wanderings in County Cardigan, p. 245) was content to repeat their descriptions, though he examined the font through a window of the locked church."]. Tyrrell-Green (ibid., p. 66) continues: "but there can be no doubt that they are intended for the emblems of the Evangelists. The man (a face only), the lion, and the ox are conventional in form, and especially is this so in the case of the lion, who would not be recognisable as such were it not for his companion figures. The eagle of St. John, however, is a fine bird in bold relief, and in better preservation than the other figures." The illustrated basin is roughly hemispherical ["roughly" is generous for such an amorphous basin]; the figures appear at approximately 90-degree angles of each other. Peter Lord, in Diwylliant... (1998-2003, vol. 3: 85 and pl. 111) dates the font to the 12th century and reiterates the symbolism: "The iconography of the font from Llanfair Clydogau is straightforward, presenting the four Evangelists in the conventional form of the manuscript tradition. However, the drawing of the symbols suggests that the carver was familiar with the tradition by oral transmission and had seen few, if any, manuscript examples, unless he chose to adapt them", and goes to point out the unevenness of the representation of the claimed symbols. [NB: notwithsatnding the identifiaction in Tyrrell-Green and others, it does seem paradoxical that a carver who would have been familiar with men, oxen and eagles, though, admittedly, perhaps not angels, should be able to render equally well at least three of the four, yet, only the bird is as Lord puts it- "confidently cut in bold relief"; Lord addroitly suggests that it resembles more a crow or raven than an eagle, and one could add that perhaps even a hoopoe or a woodcock, to judge by the long beak. A very trusting leap of faith is indeed required to accept these four carvings as the intended symbols of the Evangelists]. The entry for this church in COFLEIN [https://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/402887/details/st-marys-church-llanfair-clydogau] [accessed 16 January 2020] notes: "During the medieval period the church was a chapelry [...] By 1833 the church was a parish church [...] The circular font bowl, thought to date to around 1200, has representations of the four evangelists."