On Wednesday 3rd October, a number of Pentir residents joined in a short walk, exploring local footpaths.
The weather was fine, but cool and breezy, as four of us set off from Pentir square. We headed for St Cedol’s Church and investigated the churchyard. There’s an area to the west of the church which is paved by ancient gravestones from the 17th and 18th centuries, which we believe represent the outline of an earlier church. The gravestones in this patch may be associated with Plas Pentir, and we all thought it would be a good idea to record the inscriptions properly and perhaps do a bit of historical research around them. A good project for someone!
We carried on down the hill to Pont y Felin and pondered about where the mill might have been located. There’s an obvious leat upstream of the bridge on the far side of the Cegin but no apparent remains of any buildings. So we headed on up the road towards Newborough Farm and took the footpath opposite the farm along the edge of a large field.
This field had apparently been a sand quarry, which during the 1960s and ‘70s had been used by the then Ogwen Rural District Council as a landfill site. The spring emanating from the bottom of the field and joining the Cegin just upstream of the footbridge is now clean and clear but had been polluted by contaminants from the landfill until the early ‘90s.
In the adjacent field there’s a derelict building which we believe was at one time a wool factory – it would be interesting to learn more about this.
We followed the footpath across the bridge over the Cegin and across the field below Bryn Glas and then into the wooded wetland and on to Lon Fudur. This green lane winds past the old sand quarries near Bryn Howel and past another derelict building which had been inhabited up until the early ‘60s. The lane brought us on to the main road at Rhyd y Groes and we then carried on back to Pentir Square.
If anyone has any information or comments relevant to this walk please contact iwan.thomas@hotmail.co.uk
See more pictures of Lon Fudur on the Gallery page (links to this page are to be found near the bottom of every web page).