Ystradfellte

Village food and provisions

The New Inn sat closed for two years. It reopened in April 2026, a small sixteenth-century pub back in business at the centre of the village. Ystradfellte is a scatter of houses on a low spur pushing into the floor of the Afon Mellte valley, south-west of Brecon. The pub does lunch and evening meals and has parking; after so long shut, it is worth ringing ahead on 029 2297 0755 before you build an evening around it.

For provisions you leave the village. Rhos Filling Station and Shop, out by the Clun-Gwyn waterfall parking, carries basic groceries, ice cream, confectionery and soft drinks, and sells diesel but not petrol. The Post Office is listed but currently closed, and so is most of what you might expect of a village this size, which is rather the point of staying here: you come for what is around it, not what is in it.

Waterfalls and limestone

What is around it is water working through rock. Above the village the Afon Llia and Afon Dringarth join to make the Mellte, and a little south the Mellte, Hepste and Nedd Fechan have cut the soft stone into wooded gorges and falls. The Four Falls Trail is the walk people come for — five miles, three to four hours, graded strenuous — taking in Sgwd Clun-Gwyn, Sgwd Isaf Clun-Gwyn and Sgwd y Pannwr on the Mellte before Sgwd yr Eira on the Hepste. At Sgwd yr Eira a path runs behind the falling water, once the route sheep farmers used to move stock. Expect spray and exceptionally slippery footing; the link paths are narrow, rocky and stepped, and none of it suits buggies or wheelchairs, with no toilets beyond the car parks.

Nearer the houses, the Afon Mellte vanishes into limestone at Porth yr Ogof. The Geological Society calls it the largest cave mouth in Wales, about twenty metres wide and three metres high, and the river surfaces again some three hundred metres south at the Blue Pool, a short walk from Cwm Porth car park. Look, and go no further: the passages beyond are for experienced cavers and have killed people. In 1835 William Weston Young wrote of it that "there is not another in the valley of so large dimensions".

Getting to Ystradfellte

The nearest station is Aberdare, about ten miles away by road, and there is no direct bus into the village; check current travel information before you rely on one. You arrive on minor roads from the A4059 above Penderyn or up from Pontneddfechan, single-track in places, and the car parks near the falls fill before midday.

Saint Mary's Church

The Church of Saint Mary stands above the houses: the body is probably early fifteenth-century, the battered tapering west tower with its battlemented parapet later, fifteenth to sixteenth-century, and the whole was restored in 1882. Inside are a ten-by-six-panel late-medieval chancel roof, a whitewashed octagonal font, and a painted memorial to Thomas Jones of Berthlwyd, who died in 1779, carved with a winged skull and bones.

A deliberately thin history

The history is thin on purpose. An 1813 survey drawing shows only four or five houses by the church, and this may never have been a proper medieval village at all. In 1316 the Welsh rebel Llywelyn Bren surrendered to the marcher lords here before being taken to Cardiff and executed. And as recently as December 2005, sixteen people in four farmhouses in the Nedd valley became the last community in England and Wales to reach the mains, after nearly three miles of line was strung across the hills. "It will be much more convenient than it is now," said Jannet Llewellyn of Berthlwyd farm, which is what you say when you have managed a long time without.