The Lost Cottages - Waen Gyrach, Conwy

I don't know very much about this little ruin, and it's a curiously anonymous place, with little sense of it once being a home and working farm. The house is marked as Waen Gyrach on the 1888-1913 map, and it sits in a small set of fields in an area with the same name. We walked over from the car park near Llangelynin Old Church, taking a leisurely walk up to the standing stone of Maen Penddu and down past the old Penmaenmawr Water Works reservoir, where we were treated to a lovely visit by a large family of Carneddau ponies coming down to the river to drink. This was the long way round. The house is on the north side of the long, low hill of Cefn Maen Amor, and is relatively near to Capelulo.

As is often the case with these little farmsteads, the cluster of fields around the house are exempt from the right to roam, but a footpath goes through the farmstead directly in front of the house. Nearby are a couple of boundary stones, looking like small gravestones in the open land, marking a community boundary (Municipal Borough Boundary on the 1888-1913 map) that runs to the south and west of the enclosure. On this map the area is marked as 'Conway,' a tongue that runs up from the town bordered by the areas marked Gyffin, Llechwedd, and Dwygyfylchi.

The most telling fact I've found about the house is a short line in a guide to the 'Huw Tom Upland Walk': "Waen Gyrach cottage and the surrounding settlement built in the 1840s were finally abandoned in 1939 when the surrounding moorland became a military training ground." It's a sparse little statement, and all emotional implications are missing. If the cottage was still lived in at that time, how must the family have felt at being moved from their home to help with the war effort? Where did they go? What was the place like when soldiers were being trained in the area? If the house was built in the 1840s - the Upland Walk statement is rather unclear whether it was just the surrounding settlement or the house too - then the life of the place was only about 100 years. It's possible, of course, that the cottage was an earlier hafod and the settlement which enclosed it was built around it later.

Coflein has little to say about the place, beyond a bare description of its structure.

 

Very little remains of Waen Gyrach, found at Ordnance Survey grid reference SH 7398 7492, but the back wall shows nice, tight stonework.

 

 

 

There's no sign of this being a footpath, but since it's easy enough to walk around the edge of the property, I can understand why. It is marked on the map as one, however.

 

 

 

The track leads along in front of the house, cutting through the top section of the farmstead. There's no real sign of the trackway being in general use, contributing to the anonymous feeling of the place.

 

 

 

Familiar farming rubbish lies in one of the abandoned cells - corrugated iron, and an old oil drum.

 

 

 

 A doorway through into one of the cells.

 

 

 

 A small room on the end of the building. 

 

 

 

This small room seems well built, but there's no doorway through from the main house, so perhaps it was an outbuilding. 

 

 

Looking back along the length of the outbuildings. 

 

 

 

The walls seem to retain some of the render. 

 

 

 

In the easternmost room there's still a stone lintel above the fireplace.

 

 

 

This is a lovely piece of very square stone, making a short but substantial beam. 

 

 

 

Turning to look back into the other big room, one can see the fireplace there, which is quite ruined but retains some ovens. 

 

 

 

There's a lot of tumbled stone in the east end of this room, which must have been the main room. I saw no signs of windows or doorways, no gate posts (or obvious path to where the front door might have been), and no obvious sign of a garden.

 

 

 

What seems to be the bread oven at the side of the fireplace.

 

 

 

There are also some remains of a cast iron oven in the fireplace.

 

 

 

Perhaps this fireplace had a wooden beam, since there's no evidence of a beam left. The fireplace is collapsing badly. 

 

 

 

Ironwork remains in one of the buildings. Perhaps a bedstead? 

 

 

 

More unidentified metal remains, as well as an old jar. 

 

 

This broken rim of what might have been a casserole pot is the most evocative bit of rubbish that I saw. The kitchen, with the big fireplace, always feels like the heart of these houses, and one can imagine this pot being filled with good food and brought to the table to eat. 

 

 

Close outside the farmstead enclosure I found one of the boundary stones, of two marked close together on the map.

The front of this stone, found at SH 7401 7483, reads 'CL.' I'm not sure what the letters stand for. 'Common Land' has been suggested. A website about boundary stones in Northumberland suggests the initials stand for the names of the respective land owners. In the case of common land, of course, the names of land owners wouldn't apply.

The back of the stone isn't marked. 

There should be another stone at SH 7397 7488, but I couldn't find it. 

This second boundary stone was some way away in the rushes, at SH 7377 7490. 

The stone is leaning over, but the same initials, CL, can see seen. The boundary runs jaggedly past Waen Gyrach, cutting through the corner of the enclosure.