Saint Aelrhiw lived in the sixth century, in the age when Wales was covered with the small monastic settlements and preaching cells of holy men whose lives the Welsh remembered long after their names had passed out of written record. Aelrhiw's place is the far south-western tip of the Llŷn Peninsula, in the district now called Y Rhiw, within the community of Aberdaron in Gwynedd, where the land falls away toward Porth Neigwl and Cardigan Bay and looks back across the water to the mountains of Snowdonia.
The land he came to was already ancient when he arrived. Men had lived on the slopes of Mynydd Rhiw since the Stone Age, leaving behind burial chambers and quarries; on Mynydd y Graig stood the ramparts of Iron Age forts and the circles of old dwellings. Into such a country, thick with the memory of older gods and older fears, the saints of Wales carried the name of Christ. Aelrhiw is remembered as the founder and patron of the Christian settlement at Y Rhiw, and his name clung to the place with the tenacity that only holiness gives: not to a castle, not to a lordship, but to a church and a spring of water.
The church of Saint Aelrhiw stands there still. The present building was raised in 1860, but it was set upon the footings of an earlier church, so that the worship offered in that place reaches back through centuries to the saint who first gathered the people of the headland for prayer. Its churchyard, in a later age, received the bodies washed ashore at Porth Neigwl during the First World War — men without name or country, given Christian burial in the ground of a saint who had taught their forebears' forebears the hope of the resurrection. That is a fitting parable of Aelrhiw's charity: the hospitality of the Gospel offered to the stranger and the shipwrecked, even long after the saint himself had gone to God.
Below the church rises Ffynnon Aelrhiw, the saint's holy well. Welsh piety held such springs in reverence because they were bound up with the saint's own prayer and, in many places, with the water of baptism by which he made Christians. So constant was the spring that its waters were led away to turn a mill above Plas yn Rhiw, a house whose own origins go back to a defended dwelling raised in the tenth century against Viking raids on Porth Neigwl. The saint's well thus served the village twice over — as a sign of God's grace and as a source of the people's daily bread.
Of Aelrhiw's parents, his teachers, his labours and the manner of his death, the records of Wales have kept no detail; the tumult of centuries carried away the written memory of many such men. What survives is the surer testimony of a people who would not let his name die. Generation after generation the folk of Llŷn baptised, married and buried their dead in his church, drew water from his well, and called both by his name. A saint is known by his fruit, and the fruit of Aelrhiw is a Christian village on a windswept Welsh headland, still bearing his name after fourteen hundred years.
His life rebukes our appetite for notice. Aelrhiw sought no chronicle and left no monument of his own making; he gave himself to one small place and to the souls in it, and God saw to the remembering.
Let us ask Saint Aelrhiw's intercession today, and practise his hidden fidelity — serving well the small place and the few people God has actually given us, content that our names be known in heaven if nowhere else.
