Llanddeusant

Kites above the Sawdde valley

The hide at the red kite feeding station gives you close views without binoculars. The kites come in low, with buzzards and ravens usually somewhere in the same airspace. It opened in 2002, run through a local partnership, and the access is ramped and wide, dogs allowed on leads. Feeding times shift, so it is worth checking before you drive out. Tony Cross of the Welsh Kite Trust put the case for it plainly: "We would rather people come to see the bird at feeding stations than go tramping through the countryside looking for their nests and eggs."

It is a scattered farming community under the Black Mountain, spread along the upper Sawdde valley with the loose hamlets of Twynllanan and Capel Gwynfe below it. There is a village hall, but no shop, which is worth knowing before you arrive expecting one.

Ridge church and former inn

The Church of St Simon and St Jude stands on a ridge above the valley, 2.5km east of Twynllanan on the road toward Llyn y Fan Fach. It is 14th-century in origin, with a broad west tower and a south aisle added in the 15th, and its churchyard is rounded, the shape usually taken to mark an older Celtic site. Inside are panelled wagon roofs from the 15th century, a four-bay red-sandstone arcade and a medieval octagonal font of conglomerate stone. The paired dedication may originally have been to two saints named Potolius and Notolius rather than Simon and Jude. During a leaky spell in the 1980s, a jackdaw flew across the altar in the middle of a service and out through a gap in the ceiling.

Beside the church is the Old Red Lion, a building thought to date from the 1700s that was the village pub before it became a 26-bed youth hostel. It was put up for sale in 2023, and it is worth checking before you go rather than assuming it is open.

Lake walks, legend and reservoir history

The walk starts at the car park and runs 5km there and back along the River Sawdde, past a trout farm, up into the glacial bowl that holds Llyn y Fan Fach. The ground can be muddy and it is no place for a pushchair. Fitter walkers carry on over Picws Du and Fan Brycheiniog to a second lake, Llyn y Fan Fawr, a circuit of around 13km. The Beacons Way heads the other way, 20.5km of open and sometimes pathless country to Carreg Cennen Castle.

Llyn y Fan Fach is the lake of the Lady of the Lake. A fairy woman married a local farmer on the condition that he never strike her three times; when he did, she walked back into the water with all the farm's animals, and her sons became the Physicians of Myddfai. Its later history is less gentle. Work to dam it into a reservoir began in 1914, and from 1916 around 200 conscientious objectors, many brought from prisons in Cardiff and Llanelli, did the labour. It was finished in 1921. A Grade II bridge over Nant Melyn survives from the scheme.

Food stops and the nearest train

For food you drive out. Myddfai's visitor centre café, run by Emma Collingswood's team, does cawl, broccoli-and-Stilton soup, bara brith and Welsh cakes, with herbal teas under names like Ceridwen's Brew and Myddfai Magic. Llandovery has Mathews Butchers, run by Dai, Marcia and Rhys, for Welsh lamb, home-cured bacon and faggots, and the West End Café, going thirty years, for a carvery and its own sourdough. The nearest train is at Llangadog, unstaffed and step-free with four free parking spaces; the road out to the lake narrows the closer you get.

An evening in the hide

On a clear evening the kites are still the thing. You sit in the hide and watch the light go long over the Black Mountain.