The Garthangharad, Llwyngwril
The Garthangharad, Llwyngwril
This country inn combines two previously separate buildings. One has a 1736 plaque. The inn was upgraded in the Victorian era, with dormer windows added. The picture shows the building in the 1930s.
In the 1860s and 1870s Gaynor Williams of the Garthangharad Arms (as the inn was known) claimed descent from the medieval physicians of Myddfai, Carmarthenshire. She healed wounds using a blue ointment, made with a mixture the family had kept secret for centuries. According to one newspaper in 1876, people came to see her from near and far.
She died in 1888 aged 68. Her husband, John Owen Williams, had been the inn’s licensee for many years and died at Dolgellau workhouse in 1892.
The inn belonged to the Garthangharad Estate in 1854, when the estate was auctioned. Garthangharad, a mansion near Arthog, became one of the homes of Sir Richard Henry Wyatt and Lady Wyatt. Queen Victoria knighted him for 25 years’ service as parliamentary agent to the Treasury. He was high sheriff of Merionethshire and died at his home in Broadstairs, Kent, after accidentally setting fire to his clothes in 1904.
In the 1880s the inn belonged to the Hendre Estate of the Countess de Morella, widow of Spanish field-marshal Don Ramon Cabrera (d.1877). She was the main property owner locally. Her tenants came to the inn for the annual rent audit, and were treated to a dinner at the same time.
Some tenants accused her of unfairness and lack of sympathy during hard times. When she bought Llwyndu farm in 1880 she evicted the tenant, a Nonconformist, in favour of an Anglican who had been brought up a Nonconformist – and who reverted once he’d left the farm! In 1892 she included the Garthangharad Arms in an auction of parts of the Hendre Estate.
One of her sons became commander of the Prussian Dragoons and was the German emperor’s Master of Ceremonies when he died in Berlin in September 1914 (soon after the Great War began). The Countess died in April 1915. Two windows in her memory were unveiled in St Celynnin's Church in 1919.
Postcode: LL37 2UZ View Location Map
Website of the Garthangharad (Facebook)
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