St Kingsmark

The new ceramic information plaque installed by the Chepstow Society to mark the site of a forgotten medieval Priory was unveiled on Wednesday 7th October 2020.

The plaque commemorates the small Augustinian Priory of St Kingsmark or Kynemark – originally a local Welsh saint named Cynfarch, whose church had been in the area.

St Kynemark’s Priory was founded before 1270, and functioned until Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1534.

The Priory’s stones were used in later farm buildings, and there is now nothing to be seen of it above ground. Excavations in the early 1960s, before the houses on Kingsmark Lane and Normandy Way were built, uncovered evidence of three monastic ranges, but no church.

The plaque has been designed by local artist Keith Underwood, and made by ceramicist Ned Heywood. It has been installed at the top (north-west) end of the footpath leading from Kingsmark Lane down to St Kingsmark Avenue.

The plaque was unveiled on 7th October by Society chairman Geoff Sumner, incoming Society president Henry Hodges, and plaque maker Ned Heywood.

A free short information leaflet about St Kingsmark (or Kynemark) Priory is available on request from the Society, or as a download.