This October we look forward to welcoming members and their guests to St Cadoc’s, Llangattock Vibon Avel for our 62nd Annual General Meeting.

We will begin at 2pm at St Cadoc's, Llangattock Vibon Avel, Monmouthshire for Choral Evensong. This year members are in for a special treat, as the choir will be led by Welsh National Opera conductor and Llangattock Vibon Avel resident, Andrew Greenwood. Following Evensong, we will conduct the formal AGM business in the church.

St Cadoc’s will be our next vesting in Wales. The medieval Monmouthshire church comprises a tower, nave and chancel. The church was lavishly restored in 1866 by Messrs Cox & Son at the expense of John Etherington Rolls of The Hendre. In 1875, with T.H. Wyatt (1807-80) as the architect, the north aisle was added, the chancel extended, a porch and organ chamber added, and the interior remodelled.

St Cadoc’s possesses stained glass by three Victorian makers at their very best. The east window (1875) is by Lavers & Barraud, the chancel windows (1866) are by Heaton, Butler & Bayne, and the west window in the nave (1879) is an early work by C. E. Kempe. Other Kempe work (1884) can be found in the Rolls Chapel. There is also a south nave window (1914) by Powells of Whitefriars.

Buried in the churchyard is the Hon. Charles Stewart Rolls, pioneer aviator, who died 1910 in a flying accident, the first British aircraft fatality. It was C. S. Rolls that co-founded the Rolls-Royce firm.

Following the AGM, we will make the short journey to The Hendre, a sprawling red-brick Victorian mansion. Much as Pevsner described 19th-century architecture, this house is a ‘fancy dress ball’ of historical periods.

The building started life as a shooting-lodge for John Rolls in 1829. It was altered and extended extensively - predominately by T. H. Wyatt, who, in the 1830s added a neo-Norman three-storey tower, the great hall in the 1850s and twenty years later, the neo-Tudor entrance court with a porch carrying the Rolls family motto Celeritas et Veritas (Promptness and Truth). After Wyatt’s death in 1880, his clerk of works, Henry Pope oversaw the addition of the dining wing and conservatory. At the end of the century Aston Webb created a vast diagonal library wing off the Pope’s dining-room.

The Grade II* mansion was home to the Rolls family. The mansion was sold in 1984 and is now occupied as a golf club. It continues to boast some of the grandest Victorian gardens in Monmouthshire.