Waunfawr

Brewing beside the railway

At the Snowdonia Parc, you can watch steam trains pull in while you drink a pint brewed on the premises. The pub sits right beside Waunfawr station on the Welsh Highland Railway, and the ales come from its own two-barrel brewhouse, going since 1998. Carmen Pierce runs the place and does the brewing herself, which is why two of the beers are called Carmen Sutra and Carmen's Pulling Power. The others include Welsh Highland Bitter, Aur Eryri Gold, Theodore Stout and Cwrw Gwyrfai. Six handpumps. It won the local CAMRA Pub of the Year four years running, 2012 through 2015.

The food is home-cooked and served until half past eight, with a children's menu and an enclosed playground out the back. There are gardens and a patio overlooking the narrow-gauge line, so you can eat and watch the trains at the same time. Reviews split on whether the food is worth the price. Nobody argues about the setting.

Welsh voices and village links

A beer blogger who visited in 2016 noted that the bar was "almost exclusively Welsh spoken." That holds true for the village generally — the last census had nearly eight in ten residents speaking Welsh.

The pub is really the food-and-drink draw here. There's no butcher or deli, and the nearest proper shopping is Caernarfon, four miles down the A4085. The bus runs that way too: Gwynfor Coaches' S4 and S3 both call at the village on the Caernarfon–Beddgelert route.

Wooded walks and wireless remains

All five waymarked walks start from Y Ganolfan, the community centre. The area used to be open heath — the name means "the big moor" — but Antur Waunfawr now describes it as "increasingly a wooded vale where woodpeckers and flycatchers reign supreme." The short one is Yr Hen Waun. The Y Bompren route crosses the Afon Gwyrfai on an old wooden footbridge, once a summer swimming spot. Moel Smytho climbs into the country of the writer Kate Roberts, with wide views over the valley. Above everything to the east sits Cefn Du, the Marconi hill.

That hill carried Britain's most important long-wave wireless station. Built from 1912, it slung 3,600 feet of aerial wire between ten masts, each four hundred feet tall, and in 1920 it opened commercial transatlantic wireless between London and New York. It ran until 1938. The masts are all gone now. What's left is concrete foundations, giant anchor bolts and ceramic insulators scattered across the moor.

John Evans and the Missouri

Waunfawr also produced John Evans, born here in 1770, who sailed to America chasing a legend about Welsh-speaking Native Americans. He got himself jailed in St Louis as a suspected spy, travelled a thousand miles up the Missouri, wintered with the Mandan, found no Welsh anywhere, but drew maps of the Missouri that Lewis and Clark later used.

Quarry hamlets and Antur

The village came together late — scattered quarrying hamlets pulled into one place by the slate and the railway in the 1870s. Much of its recent life it owes to Antur Waunfawr, a social enterprise founded in 1984 to give work to adults with learning disabilities. It now runs fifteen businesses and employs more than a hundred people across four sites — which, for a village of scattered quarry hamlets, is quite a coming-together.