Capel Gwynfe

The Red K6 and the ridge

The red telephone box beside the churchyard is a K6, designed by Giles Gilbert Scott and cast by the Carron Company of Stirlingshire, and it carries a George VI crown. It is Grade II listed, protected for group value with the two churches it stands near. You arrive past a "Three Red Kites" sculpture, which the village treats as the marker for where to turn.

This is a dispersed farming settlement, more a scatter of stone cottages than a street. The church and community hall sit at about 208 metres, on a ridge between the Meilwch and Clydach valleys, with the Black Mountain uplands filling the horizon to the south. Both streams drain north-east towards the Afon Sawdde.

Practical Gwynfe and its church heritage

There is no pub, no shop and no school in Gwynfe, and no public transport. For a pint or provisions you drive the two miles of country lane back to the A4069 and on to Llangadog, about three miles off, where the railway station — unstaffed, step-free, four free parking spaces — is the nearest you will get by train. The Red Lion in Llangadog does food and keeps a beer garden, with rooms if you need them; L J Bailey & Sons, the butcher on Church Street, is worth the stop for its sausages and pies. Les runs the counter.

For a place this small it keeps three listed religious buildings. All Saints was built in 1898–99 to a Free Perpendicular design by E. H. Bruton of Cardiff, in local red sandstone with grey Forest of Dean dressings; Daniel Price of Llangadog put it up for £1,955. Inside there is a tiled reredos and a five-light east window of 1899 showing the Annunciation, the Good Shepherd and the Nativity. When it opened, the older chapel-of-ease it replaced became the church hall — a small early-nineteenth-century building on the site of a chapel recorded here since at least the sixteenth century.

A world-map chapel and mountain days

Capel Jerusalem is the one to see. The Independent cause dates from the 1740s and the chapel was rebuilt more than once, but the interior has kept a three-sided painted timber gallery, grained box pews and a ceiling panel painted with a map of the world. A plaque remembers David Griffiths, born at Glanmeilwch in 1792 and ordained here in 1820, who spent fifteen years in Madagascar and helped translate the Bible into Malagasy. He was once condemned to death; the sentence was commuted after a ransom and a promise to leave.

The walking is what draws people out here. From Llanddeusant a graded-easy path of about two and a half miles climbs to Llyn y Fan Fach, the glacial lake below the Carmarthen Fans that carries the legend of the Lady of the Lake. The red kite feeding station at Llanddeusant, running since 2002, has a hide with ramped access where kites, buzzards and ravens come in close, and dogs on leads are welcome. Further off, Castell Carreg Cennen stands on a crag nearly ninety metres above the River Cennen, and Dinefwr's deer park and play yards make an easy family day near Llandeilo.

Village honours and useful facilities

Gwynfe took Carmarthenshire Village of the Year in 2004, and it produced Sir John Williams, born at Bailey, Gwynfe, in 1840, who became a royal physician and helped found the National Library of Wales. The public lavatories beside the hall stay open around the clock, which is worth knowing if you come back down off the mountain at dusk.