High summer and the rain is pouring down on the cornfields and coppices of Ewenny, on the Bridgend golf course and the neat rows of 1930s semis, on the pocked grey battlements of the Benedictine Priory, on the graves of the Picton-Turbervills and the Carnes and the Bowens.

The rain swells the River Ewenny, the Afon Ewenni, and its dark, glassy tributaries skeining through the water meadows, by the hawthorn and the willow herb, edging the old Barry railway lines; genealogies of water carved deep in the Welsh soil, their names incantations of this place: Nant Canna, Nant Ciwc, Nant Crymlyn, Ewenny Fawr, Ewenny Fach, Afon Alun.

Inside the Priory church, the silence is weighted, layered. This has always been contested ground. Ewenny Priory was established as a cell of St. Peter’s, Gloucester, in the early twelfth century by the local Anglo-Norman landowner, William de Londres, and his son, Maurice, who fortified it to an exceptional, military level, to withstand the ebb and flow of raids and attacks from rival lords, Welsh and Norman, and Irish pirates raging up the Bristol Channel. This was no hermitical refuge, but a place to pray with one eye open and one hand on your sword, dedicated to the bellicose St. Michael the Archangel, a steeled and armoured tutelar who could be relied upon, as John Mirk wrote at the turn of the fifteenth century, to “defende you from your enmyse” without pause.

Drenched, my eight-year-old son and my husband and I pace soberly through the nave, along a lopsided march of heavy white Romanesque columns and arches. We trace the fragments of paint outlining the thin, sad face of a long-forgotten saint and the crumbling niches where the rood screen once lodged.