St Madoc's Church, Llanmadoc

St Madoc's Church at Llanmadoc, at the north-western tip of the Gower peninsula, stands on land held by the military orders through the late medieval centuries. Local tradition — long recorded in the parish and repeated by the Victorian historians of Gower — remembers the manor as a Templar possession, granted to the order in the twelfth century along with the neighbouring parish of Llanddewi and worked as an outlying estate of the Welsh preceptory at Slebech in Pembrokeshire.

When the Templars were suppressed in 1312 their Welsh holdings passed intact to the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem, and Llanmadoc appears explicitly in the Hospitallers' 1338 survey as a member of Slebech commandery. Under both orders the church and its glebe served the same practical purpose: sheep pasture on the limestone plateau, salt-marsh grazing at Whiteford, fisheries in the Burry inlet and a sheltered landing that let the brethren move wool and hides by sea to their houses across the Bristol Channel.

The little cruciform church you see today — thick stone walls, a squat saddleback tower, a scatter of early Christian inscribed stones set into the porch — is essentially the medieval fabric the orders knew, restored in the nineteenth century by the antiquarian rector J. D. Davies. The pattern of stone-walled fields around it still traces the medieval organisation of the manor.