Greenery

Had occasion to pass one of my favourite chapels today. It stands alone beside a little river beyond the nearest village, the graveyard gloomy under overshadowing trees. What piques my interest is this unusual green glass window that I would love to see from the inside, the emerald translucency of the small square panes creating an underwater effect, in my imagination.

The chapel's called Beulah, the name, I discover, of a mystical place somewhere heaven and earth. The Baptist sect broke away from the established church at the end of the 17th century and built the first chapel here in 1808. Rebuilt several time this version dates from 1910, the peak of the great religious revival in Wales when chapels literally overflowed with worshippers and popular preachers attracted a fervent following, eager for immersion in the adjacent stream. It was also the era of a new movement in art and design that, like religious nonconformism, harked back to basics.

The Coflein listing of historical monuments in Wales states
The current chapel is of stone, built on the gable entry plan type in the Arts and Crafts Style. The façade has a hooded door inscribed "1808 BEULAH 1910" above which is a stepped, flat-headed tripartite window containing small panes of leaded green glass. Side elevations are lit by two storeys of flat-headed windows.

The Arts and Crafts movement promoted an architectural style that relied upon traditional materials and simple design features. It's unusual to see it set deep in rural West Wales but the Carmarthen architects must have had the minister's approval and no doubt the congregation took pride in their spiffy new building with window to match the green fields all around.

As the 20th century wore on the chapel's congregation dwindled and last year it finally closed, with only one worshipper left alive.The rest lie in the recent graves whose shiny new head stones mingle with heavily-lichened old markers in the weed-tangled cemetery.

Among the mainly Welsh inscriptions I found this confident prediction on the grave of George Miles, a local farmer who died in 1867, aged 58.

Farewell brothers & dear sisters,
Relatives and friends, adieu;
Ere it's long 'twill be your station,
I was once as well as you,
Here I take my habitation,
I'm but a lifeless lump of clay:
Soothe your tears and lamentations:
I'll meet you at the Judgement Day.


Curiously, there was once a station, or at least a train halt, close by this out-of-the-way spot: a long-extinct branch railway line passed within yards of the chapel. (The embankment and a bridge remain.) I wonder if anxious children, listening as their elders read out these admonitory words, imagined a Doomsday locomotive stopping one day to pick them up and carry them to the appropriate region of the Hereafter?