The Dragons Head sits beside Llangenny Bridge, where the Grwyne Fawr comes down fast off the Black Mountains. It is a country pub of the unfussy sort: a real fire, a garden, parking, and a bar that keeps Rhymney Hobby Horse session bitter on as the regular ale alongside a couple of changing guests. The food is plain and short: dishes have included garlic chicken, ham, egg and chips, onion rings, and a vegetarian roast at Sunday lunch.
The pub is the start and finish of a six-and-a-half-mile circuit onto the mountain: a wet green lane, the Cwm-cegyr track, then open hillside to a rocky summit trig point with the Black Mountains, Ysgyryd Fawr and the hills of the South Wales valleys laid out around it. The descent drops through fields and picks up the Grwyne Fawr back into the village. It is graded moderate to hard, and the lanes are working ones—leave room for residents and the tractors.
There is no shop in Llangenny, and none anywhere in the Vale of Grwyney. What the community has instead is a pub apiece across three small settlements, and Crickhowell two kilometres west. The town carries the food shopping. Grenfell & Sons is the family grocer; MT Cashell & Sons handles meat, handcrafted cheeses, pâtés, pies and cooked meats; Natural Weigh, which opened in 2018 as Wales's first zero-waste shop, sells organic wholefoods, artisan bread and refills. Crickhowell Bakery is on the High Street.
St Cenau's church stands close to the water, late-medieval, listed Grade II*. The round Norman font, carved with cable moulding, is the only survival from the earlier church on the site. Inside there are wagon roofs, small squints, a Tudor-headed priest's door and a short screen with pierced tracery, and on the wall a 1688 tablet to Lewis Morgan carrying a nag's-head crest. Charles Buckeridge restored the building in 1863, and it was worked on again in 1894.
A footpath running north of the church reaches a single-span humpbacked packhorse bridge over the Grwyne Fawr, one of a run of stone bridges along these rivers and already drawn on the tithe map of 1839.
The village takes its name from Cenau, a saint whose spring, Ffynnon Ceneu, rises in woodland across the river. An oratory said to have stood there was pulled down in 1790, and an early-medieval iron bell turned up in the demolition; it is now held by National Museum Wales. For a long stretch the valley worked for its living—watermills grinding grain and fulling wool, an iron forge down near the Usk, and paper-making that carried on until 1950.
The settlement has spread up the valley sides mostly within the last 150 years; the historic core is small, and the whole community lies inside the Brecon Beacons National Park, with the Grwyne Fawr marking part of the boundary between Powys and Monmouthshire. You reach it by minor lanes signposted off the A40 between Abergavenny and Crickhowell, and the nearest station is Abergavenny, about six miles away on the Welsh Marches Line.
Christopher Somerville came down off the mountain into Llangenny after rain and wrote that "all seemed right with the little world folded into its valley in the eastern skirts of the mountains."