Myddfai

Herbal Tea and a Village-SOS Café

The herbal teas at the Myddfai Community Hall café are called Bardic Bliss, Ceridwen's Brew, Llyn-y-Fantastic, Myddfai Magic and Physician's Treasure. They are caffeine-free, and the names are linked to a medieval Physicians of Myddfai story. You can order one alongside cawl, a bowl of broccoli and Stilton or carrot and coriander soup, a jacket potato or the Physicians Salad, and sit with the free Wi-Fi while you drink it.

Emma Collingswood manages the café and volunteers keep it running. The building itself is quietly unusual: under-floor heating from a ground-source heat pump, solar panels on the roof, and high-specification insulation. It was built through the Big Lottery Village SOS scheme, appeared in a BBC series with Sarah Beeny, and was opened in June 2011 by the then Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall.

Local Craft and Medieval Stone

At the visitor centre is Tŷ Talcen, a shop run by volunteers with its profits going to a local charity. It carries work from more than fifty-five local crafters and producers — jams, honey, chutneys, Pemberton's chocolates, books, cards, artwork, and plants and herbs grown in Myddfai itself. A small cupboard of food essentials is kept for visitors staying nearby, which is worth knowing if you have taken a cottage and forgotten the basics.

Myddfai sits about three miles from Llandovery, on the western edge of the Brecon Beacons. St Michael's Church is Grade I, largely medieval, and grander than you would expect for a place this rural. Five big arches run the length of it beneath medieval wagon roofs. A carved memorial remembers David Jones, who died in 1719, and John Jones, who died in 1739, both recorded as Physicians of Myddfai. A lugged stone basin is said to have been carried here from the vanished chapel of Dol Hywel, and the roughly circular churchyard may preserve an earlier enclosure.

The Lady and the Physicians

In the legend, a farmer marries the Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach on the condition that he never strikes her three times. He does, in the end, and she walks back into the lake with the farm animals; their sons become generations of herbalists and healers. The remedies attributed to them were written down and recopied for centuries.

Lake, Well and Long-Distance Paths

You can walk to the lake itself. Llyn y Fan Fach lies below the Black Mountain escarpment, reached by a proper mountain path with steep sections and wide views over ground the glaciers left behind. Closer to the village, a spring on Mynydd Myddfai is remembered as the Physicians' Well, and the Myddfai Circular runs roughly eight miles from Llandovery station, part of it along the Heart of Wales Line Trail. The station is unstaffed and has no ticket office; the roads in are minor lanes off the A40 at Llandovery.

Kites, Hillforts and Llandovery

Further out there is Llandovery for shops and castle viewpoints, the red kite feeding station at Llanddeusant, where buzzards and ravens turn up too, and Garn Goch, whose larger, probably Iron Age hillfort encloses about eleven hectares and is the biggest in south-west Wales. The plants and herbs on the shop shelves, though, were grown in Myddfai.