Yr Gof Cynwyl Around 1960

A Memory of Cynwyl Elfed.

Yr Gof Cynwyl.
(I’m no verra guid at the Welsh I doubt)

It would be around 1960 that I used to get jobs done at the Cynwyl blacksmith shop. Mr Jones was a good man although crabby at haymaking time. I went there to get something done in the middle of the day one time and he was furiously putting new plates on a mower knife, which the bloke could have done very well himself if he would have bothered. The shop was full of other people waiting to get something done. I went home and came back before 6 the next morning and found him in excellent humor.
There was a woman moved into the house next to his and she took the notion that his customers should not park in front of her house although there was nowhere else to go and that is where customers had parked from time immemorial. Probably before Cynwyl Bridge was built. I went to get a job done and parked in the usual manner outside her house. After a time she came into the shop and started raving at me. I listened in amazement having not come across her before and when she eased up a bit to take breath I raised my hands above my head saying "Peace Be Unto You". And went and moved the Landrover.
When I came back, breathless from her blitzkrieg, Mr Jones said, "Do you realize she is a clergyman’s widow?". I thought her qualifications not good.
Some time later my Swedish sister-in-law went to get something from Cynwyl and reported that the woman was fighting with the blacksmith’s wife on Cynwyl bridge. Later she phoned up trying to get Gejan to be a witness to the episode but Gejan claimed not to have enough English (or Welsh) to know what it was all about.
The woman must have twigged that she wasn’t getting too much support from the 'uncouth locals' and soon went away again.
On the other side of the road was the shop of Luther Edwards, a merry-minded, one-legged cobbler. When the blacksmith needed to use a pair of pliers he always ran across the road and borrowed a pair from Luther. He told me that if he kept a pair himself they always got stolen.

We left Hermon in 1963 for NW Scotland.

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