About Newport Cathedral (St Woolos)

The name “Woolos” is an English corruption of Gwynllyw, the 5th-century Welsh warlord and later saint who first founded a religious establishment on this hilltop site. According to tradition, Gwynllyw converted to Christianity through the influence of his wife and their son, Cadog, who would himself go on to become a celebrated Welsh saint; in penance for the sins of his earlier warlike life, Gwynllyw was told in a dream to build a church wherever he found a white ox bearing a black spot on its forehead. He discovered such an animal at the top of Stow Hill, and built a wooden hermitage there — the origin of the site’s long religious history. In the 9th century, the original wooden church was rebuilt in stone, an unusual and significant undertaking for Wales at the time, reflecting the growing importance of Gwynllyw’s cult and the accumulated wealth of his shrine. King William II granted the church to St Peter’s monastery in Gloucester in 1093, and the Benedictine monks there likely funded construction of most of the current nave, including its spectacular Norman arch, built between around 1140 and 1160. That arch rests on Roman columns reputedly taken from the legionary fort at Caerleon, just north of Newport, giving the building a direct physical link to the Roman military presence that had once dominated the region centuries earlier. Part of this Norman-era structure survives today as the Galilee Chapel at the cathedral’s west end. The former parish church of St Woolos was formally confirmed as the diocesan cathedral of the Church in Wales in 1949, elevating the site to cathedral status after roughly fifteen centuries of continuous religious use.