Not far from Pontcysyllte Aqueduct the Llangollen Canal starts with catching its water from River Dee in a horseshoe dam. I went there after having photographed the aqueduct (see previous post) to see if I could photograph the dam and the beginning of the canal. But I didn’t succeed in catching anything that I liked about the canal or dam. Instead a tiny little church caught my interest.
St Tysilio Church is the parish church of Llantysilio, near Llangollen and next to the dam of the river Dee. It is dedicated to St Tysilio, who lived in the 7th C. St Tysilio founded a number of Christian monastic communities in Wales and was the son of a Prince of Powys (now a county in Wales but at that time a small kingdom).
The church was built in the 15th C, but some parts of the building are said to date from 1180. It caught my interest solely because of its romantic setting with summer flowers overgrown in the churchyard, gravestones leaning in all possible directions and evening sunrays breaking through the clouds and the tree canopies lighting the church with a soft yellow light.
I had to come back a second time to catch it in daytime and to be able to enter the premises. As most churches in England and Wales, Llantysilio Church was closed for the evening the first time I arrived. But my best photos were definitely those in the evening light. Around 8 pm it was still very bright around midsummer in Wales,
