HLW (D) 10

Drefach and Felindre  

2001  

Special  

Designated  

Despite the changes brought to the woollen textile industry in rural Wales through mechanization, many areas of manufacture remained closely tied to the agrarian economy. Equally, there were from the early l9th century onwards, dramatic developments in factory-scale production in both North and South Wales, although nowhere developed as a manufacturing region comparable, for example, with the West Riding of Yorkshire. The Drefach-Felindre area is included here on the basis of combining both these aspects of the Welsh woollen industry. Within the narrow valleys of the Brân, the Esgair and the Bargod, all tributary to the Teifi at Henllan, the swift streams descend about 200m in a distance of 5km or less, and there remains a remarkable concentration of mills and factories, of industrial housing, and of the physical evidence for the use of this abundant water power. The valleys are separated by gently sloping plateau surfaces between 200 and 300m above OD and, to the north, fringing the Teifi valley, former commons of moor and marsh. Today, the whole area is predominantly agricultural, the textile industry having rapidly declined almost to the point of extinction in the early to mid-20th century. Not all the present day farms or former farms, however, have the medieval pedigree of Cryngae. Lying to the north west of Drefach, in the 14th century this farm was the seat of the then Constable of Newcastle Emlyn Castle, Llywelyn ap Gwilym Fychan. He was the uncle of the most celebrated medieval Welsh poet, Dafydd ap Gwilym, who spent some of his youth in the area. The valleys then were part of a Welsh maenor within the Lordship of Emlyn, valued for their woods and wastes and for a few local corn mills with their dues of blawd gwagrau (sieved flour). Some of these, and new sites as well, are recorded as pandai (fulling mills) in the late 16th and 17th centuries, testimony to the development of a domestic textile industry. This inheritance of craft work, together with the physical advantages of the streams are the principal factors in the emergence and short-lived dominance of the Drefach- Felindre area in the late l9th and early 20th centuries. The hamlets of Drefelin, Drefach, Felindre, Cwmpengraig and Cwmhiraeth developed around these early fulling mills into the densely populated settlements of the later l9th century. New settlements developed at road junctions and at river crossings on the edges of small commons at Pentrecagal and Waungilwen. Of the two medieval church sites, upland Penboyr is remote and isolated from the valley hamlets, with only a single farm and a motte, Tomen Llawddog, close by. Llangeler, by contrast, formerly Merthyr Celer, was probably the pre-Norman mother church of the commote of Emlyn and an early nucleated settlement. Typical of the early interrelationships between the upland farms and the valley hamlets is the case of Richard Richards and his brother, of Bach y Gwyddel Farm, east of Cwmpengraig, who opened a fulling mill there in the 1760s. Such farmer/craftsmen were bitterly opposed to the spinning jenny, first brought to Cwmpengraig in the 1820s, which was thought to threaten the livelihood of hand spinners. Hand spinning had vanished by the later l9th century, but domestic handloom weaving continued. The links between farms and hamlets is evidenced in a network of footpaths, tracks and bridleways. These have recently been reopened in an ambitious scheme entitled Llwybrau’r Gwlân/Woollen Trails led by the former Carmarthen District Council. At the industry’s height, about 1900, there were 52 woollen mills, factories or businesses operating in the Drefach-Felindre area, and the villages of the middle Teifi valley became the main centres of woollen manufacturing in Wales. Only a handful of mills remain in operation, including the Museum of the Welsh Woollen Industry at Drefach; this is housed in the former Cambrian Mills, which are the largest in the area, and were built between 1902 and 1912. Although many buildings have gone, there is still a full range of mills from the smaller, ruinous sites in the upper Bargod valley and elsewhere, through medium-sized structures to large factories. These latter, built at the turn of the century, were highly mechanized and did not depend on water power, although they were built over earlier sites that did. Yet a continued dependence on water power was a marked feature of the industry. Prosperity led to building and rebuilding at all social levels. Only a few of what were numerous mud-walled, thatch-roofed cottages remain — notably the long, low range of Ogof, near Cwmpengraig, where such a cottage was extended to house a dyeing room and a weaving room to accommodate four handlooms. The celebrated local historian Daniel Jones remarked on the rebuilding in his own day, with new two-storey brick and stone houses. Local stone and clay quarries testify to the boom for the building industry. A good example survives of a single storey terrace of weavers’ cottages at Glyn-teg. A rich social and cultural life developed, centring on chapel, choir and band. Unsuitable now for complete reopening, though still operating in short stretches at Henllan, is the Teifi Valley Railway. Not until 1895 did the Great Western Railway open the Pencader-Newcastle Emlyn line via Pentre-cwrt and Henllan. Proximity to the railway led to a late development of large gas- or electric-powered factories at Pentrecwrt, many using imported, not Welsh mountain, wool and selling, not to retailers in the Welsh valleys, but to big city wholesalers. The last boom of the industry in First World War contracts for uniforms was followed by rapid decline. The limits of the Drefach-Felindre area are readily definable. The Teifi valley to the north of Drefach includes the park of the former mansion of Llysnewydd, typical of many in the valley itself and the surviving Dol Haidd. To the south, the Carmarthenshire dissected plateau uplands of Moelfre, Blaen Brân and Blaen Bargod mark the watershed between the Teifi valley and the southward flowing tributaries of the Tywi, the Duad and the Gwili. Before l9th-century enclosure, these were the large open commons of Penboyr parish in territories protected by two medieval mottes, Tomen Seba and Tomen Llawddog, and, much earlier, marked by Bronze Age cairns placed on the rounded hill summits. To the west, the long bridleway known as Lôn Gypsies, is now reopened as part of the ‘Factory Trail’. To the east, another and more important north-south ridgeway route from Llangeler encompasses the high ground east of the Bargod valley. For most of its course, this route is followed by the modern A486 which branches north east at Mountain Hall to include Pentre-cwrt before rejoining the Teifi valley.