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More About Carmarthenshire

This is farming country, and it looks it. The Tywi comes down a broad green valley past Llandovery and Llandeilo, with a castle standing on the high ground either side of it. It reaches the tide at Carmarthen, which has been a town since the Romans put a fort there, and runs on to the sea below it.

The coast is the other half of the county, and it is a shore of estuaries rather than cliffs. The Tywi, the Tâf and the Gwendraeth all reach the sea within a few miles of each other, leaving miles of sand at low tide. Llanelli holds the eastern end and Pendine the western.

You can still walk up to Llyn y Fan Fach, the lake under the Black Mountain where this county's oldest story begins. The path starts at Llanddeusant and runs about two and a half miles up to the lake, with a couple of hundred metres of climb. Allow two hours there and back, and boots rather than trainers.

The legend says a young man from Blaen Sawdde saw a woman rise out of the lake. He courted her, and she agreed to marry him. They had three sons, and she taught all three of them everything she knew about plants and healing.

The remarkable part is that her sons were real, and so were their descendants. From the thirteenth century until 1739 there was a line of physicians at Myddfai, the parish just below the lake. The first on record is Rhiwallon, with his three sons, and they were doctors to Rhys Gryg, the prince who ruled this part of Wales.

They wrote their remedies down in Welsh. The recipes were copied into the Red Book of Hergest. That is the fourteenth-century manuscript which also carries the Mabinogion, the oldest collection of Welsh myth. Those remedies were printed in 1861 under the title Meddygon Myddfai, the Physicians of Myddfai. John Jones, the last of the line, died in 1739.

Both ends of the story are still on the map. Myddfai is a village with a church and a scatter of houses, four miles south of Llandovery. The lake sits in a hollow under a long ridge called Bannau Sir Gaer, and you can walk right to the edge of it.

Stand there on a quiet afternoon and you can see why somebody once decided a woman came out of it.

The far end of the county has a shorter story. Babs took the world land speed record on Pendine Sands in 1926, and came back to run the beach again for the centenary in April 2026. The path back down runs along the shore and past the dam at the far end. Llandovery is twenty minutes away, and worth an hour when you get there.