Former Plough Inn, Llandegla

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This original part of this building, now The Grousemoor guesthouse, was a drovers’ inn called the Plough Inn. The village had 16 pubs catering for drovers in the pre-railway age, when large numbers of farm animals were walked this way from North-west Wales to markets in England.

For many decades in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Plough Inn was kept by successive generations of the Harrison family. Licensee Edward Harrison was well known in the Welsh Independent chapel movement. His eldest daughter married John Jones of Bodidris at Pisgah chapel in 1883. John discovered her dead body in the yard of their home, Tŷ Hir, in April 1896. She was 38 years old and left three children.

As motor traffic on the road past the inn grew, the enterprising Harrisons installed Llandegla’s first petrol pump. Their Yale Garage was at the far (western) end of today’s car park.

Jack Rennie bought the Plough Inn from the Harrisons in the 1940s. Decades later, his son Derek recalled some of the pub’s characters for the Llandegla Millennium Action Group. They included “John y Botel” (John the Bottle), who arrived on the 6pm bus, played dominoes with the landlord or landlady and departed on the 7pm bus – always clutching a bottle of beer for the journey home.

The Plough Inn closed in 2015. Local farmer Brian Jones and his sister Pamela Morris refurbished the building and reopened it in 2018 as The Grousemoor, a country guesthouse which caters for functions and provides afternoon teas.

A little to the east is a prehistoric burial site, partly obliterated by road widening in 1935. The ashes of four bodies were found in two urns, a pit and a stone cist. The remains of several burial chambers and cairns in the Llandegla area indicate that there was an established population here in the Bronze Age.

Sources: Llandegla Then and Now, by the Llandegla Millennium Action Group, and the National Library of Wales

Postcode: LL11 3AB    View Location Map

Website of The Grousemoor