Cymer Abbey

The remains of the church and west tower are very plain, but substantial with walls surviving about nave archway height.

Like other Cistercian communities in Wales, Cymer Abbey farmed sheep and bred horses, supplying them to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, Llewelyn the Great.

The Welsh Wars of Edward I (1276–77 and 1282–83) probably contributed to the abbey's relative poverty, for instance the failure to build the usual Cistercian central tower is one indication of this, while Alun John Richards argues that the cooler climate of the 14th century unduly affected the Abbey's lands which were largely mountainous.

However, Cymer did possess a fine, thirteenth century silver gilt chalice and paten (Eucharist plate), which must have been hidden at the Dissolution; rediscovered in 1898, under a stone at Cym-y-mynach, they are now in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

As with other monastic sites in England and Wales, the abbey did not survive the Dissolution of the 1530s, and parts of the fabric were recycled for their dressed stone.