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With a population of under 2,000, Tregaron is an attractive little market town in the heart of mid-Wales, nearly 70-percent of whose population in the last census were fluent Welsh speakers.
There, where the A485 and the B4343 pass alongside each other, is a classic Welsh town where the tourist on holiday in Wales can experience an entirely different culture, almost like foreign territory where the local folk, although extremely hospitable, adhere to their old traditions.
Not that all the locals were always hospitable. In the 18th century Tregaron was the home of a family who were literally bandits. Matthew Evans kept an inn in the town and was himself regarded as a respectable citizen. But his two sons and a daughter, known collectively as Plant Mat (Matt’s Children), were feared and hated throughout the area. They lived for several years in a cave, outlawed by the community, and terrorised the district as merciless robbers. To their friends these thieving rascals would give a glove as a token of immunity, and for a long time, because of the narrowness of the cave entrance, they remained at liberty.
But eventually they stooped to murder and, the holiday in Wales visitor will be glad to know, were quickly arrested, sentenced to death and executed. Holiday in Wales visitors to the Devil’s Bridge area will find that the robbers’ cave still bears their name. The tale is a stigma that Tregaron bears to this day, but mostly in jokes about the wild Welsh and the ‘tight’ nature of the Cardi, the native of Cardiganshire, or Ceredigion as it is known to Wales holiday visitors today.
Tregaron, which was granted a Royal Charter in 1292, owes its origin and growth to its central location in the upper Teifi Valley, its human population outnumbered by its sheep, grazing the fertile farmland to the south. The town was a main gathering point for the drovers, who, before the advent of rail and road transport, herded large numbers of cattle, sheep and even geese hundreds of miles to the lucrative markets of south-east England. Tourists visiting Tregaron during a Wales holiday will learn that it was once a large producer of woollen goods with many woollen water mills and the location of a home knitting industry, men, women and children knitting socks and other garments at home for export to the bustling industrial areas of South Wales.
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