The latest village shop casualty in August 2015 was the closure of Llandegla's store & post office. To date, hopes of a community shop on the same site or elsewhere in the village have come to nought, though there remains some optimism within the community that it will still re-open somewhere. So far, the community has pledges of both funding and volunteer hours. Grants will or should top things up. Meanwhile, the former shop continues to be marketed as a potential home, with the asking price reduced a fortnight ago to £159,000.
Meanwhile, things haven't got any better in Llandegla. This week, one of its pubs, The Plough, also closed. It, too, is on the market as a private house at £250,000, a real snip, given the five acres of land attached thereto. The Plough was once owned and operated by
Herself, but that was a long time ago. The Plough was more a gastro-pub than a local. It leaves The Crown as the only Llandegla village pub.
Like all pubs that make it to the residential market, it will need work. Take Llanfwrog Rural's The Old Cross Keys. This was first on the market in
January 2015 at £325,000. 15 months later, it's valued at £230,000. Neither has it sold nor had any specific interest.
Another pub that closed is in Gwyddelwern. Reputed to be the oldest pub in Wales, the former Rose & Crown reverted to its original name of Tŷ Mawr. It was idle for short period before a very sympathetic restoration. It re-opened in 1999. It soon closed again but re-opened some eight years later, in the summer of 2014. It closed at Christmas and remains to let.
Rural pubs are doing better than rural shops but it very much depends where you are. It perhaps wasn't surprising that Gwyddelwern's pub shut because it was simply too far from anywhere and relied too heavily on locals, to the extent that it was seen as a community rather than gastro-pub. Let's face it, Gwyddelwern isn't the most prosperous local village and is dominated by grim council-commissioned Bryn Donwy houses and flats. The pub restoration was very good but one thing I disliked about it was in winter the open fire smoked out the entire pub, including the upper eating area. The large open fire was a feature but the design of it and the building was such that it spread woodsmoke everywhere.
Gwyddelwern lost its village shop relatively recently (in 2009). That never reopened and it is now a house.
If you live in a village and you run out of sugar, only the following have shops:
- Clawddnewydd
- Llanarmon yn Iâl
- Llandyrnog
- Pentre Llanrhaeadr—which we understand is actually up for sale
- Pwllglas
Three of the five surviving shops are community-run (i.e. by volunteers). The first was
Clawddnewydd, in the late 1990s; followed by Llanarmon (2013); and the reintroduction of a shop in Pwllglas (March 2013). Will they be joijed by Llandegla? It seems that community shops are now the only possible way of securing village facilities.
Go back 50 years, when villages were generally smaller but before larger supermarkets, most villages had a store. Fewer people owned cars (perhaps there was just one in the family) and buses were more "frequent". The list of villages in the Rhuthun area with shops was:
- Betws Gwerful Goch, Bryneglwys, Bryn Saith Marchog, Bontuchel, Clawddnewydd, Clocaenog, Cyffylliog, Derwen, Eryrys, Gellifor, Gwyddelwern, Llanarmon yn Iâl, Llanbedr DC, Llandelga, Llandyrnog, Llanelidan, Llanfair DC, Llanferres, LLanfihangel, Llangynhafal, Llanarhaeadr (not Pentre Llanrhaeadr), Melin y Wig, Pentrecelyn and Rhewl
30 years ago, before Lo-cost (now Co-op) and certainly before internet food shopping, shops in the following villages had closed: Bryneglwys, Clocaenog, Derwen, Eryrys, Llanfair DC, Llangynhafal, Llanrhaeadr, Pentreceltn, and Rhewl. Soon after, things accelerated sharply, so that in addition to the five shops listed above, there were shops elsewhere only at... Gwyddelwern, and Llandegla.
