Lloyd George's father, a schoolmaster, died of pneumonia when David was barely a year old. His widowed mother Elizabeth brought the children home to her brother Richard Lloyd in Llanystumdwy. Richard was a shoemaker and a Disciples of Christ minister, and Highgate Cottage on the village street was small even by the standards of the 1860s. The family lived there only through Richard's generosity, and the boy who would one day reshape the British state grew up listening to political and theological argument over the cobbler's bench. Highgate is preserved today as part of the Lloyd George Museum, furnished as it would have been when David did his homework by the fire. He attended the village school, Ysgol Llanystumdwy, which still teaches four-to-eleven-year-olds in Welsh. He never went to university. The chapel and the cobbler's shop were his education.

Walk to the centre of the village and you reach a three-arched stone bridge over the Dwyfor, late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, Grade II listed. Look at the downstream parapet on the right-hand side. The initials D LL G are carved clearly into the stone. Tradition holds that the future Prime Minister cut them there as a boy. The bridge is often confused with Bont Fechan, a mile away by a garden centre of the same name, but the carving is here, on this bridge, where the river runs past the back of the village. A century and a half after the knife went into the parapet, the same name was being spoken in Downing Street and at Versailles.

Lloyd George chose his burial place himself, on a wooded bend of the Dwyfor a short walk from Highgate. After his death in 1945 the memorial was designed by Clough Williams-Ellis, the architect best known for the Italianate fantasy of Portmeirion across Cardigan Bay. Williams-Ellis built a low circular wall around a glacial boulder that Lloyd George had picked out, leaving the rock as the headstone. The slate plaque on the entrance gate is inscribed by the Welsh sculptor Jonah Jones with a poem by Lloyd George's nephew William George, who later served as Archdruid of Wales. Williams-Ellis also designed the village's art-deco Lloyd George Museum and remodelled the Capel Moriah where the family worshipped. Three Welshmen, then, made this place what it is: the politician, the architect, and the cobbler-uncle who took him in.

Lloyd George is not the only writer who chose Llanystumdwy as the place to come home to. The historian and travel writer Jan Morris, who chronicled the British Empire, the Spanish-speaking world, and her own gender transition with the same clear-eyed prose, lived for more than fifty years on the slopes above the village. She came first to her ancestral home Plas Trefan, then moved to a converted stable block in the grounds, Trefan Morys, where she wrote her last books and died in November 2020. The village absorbs its famous residents quietly. The 200-year-old inn Tafarn y Plu, associated with the playwright Wil Sam Jones, sits at the centre of village life. Lloyd George paid for the institute hall, Neuadd y Pentref, with the damages from a libel case he won. Money won in court, returned to the village that raised him.

The Dwyfor reaches Cardigan Bay just south of the village, near a beach where the Wales Coastal Path passes. A circular footpath leads past Lloyd George's grave through the Coed Trefan deciduous woodland and back along the riverbank. The community of Llanystumdwy stretches inland to take in Chwilog, Afon Wen, Llanarmon, and Llangybi, with a 2021 population of 1,919; it became part of Gwynedd only in 1974, when Caernarfonshire was abolished. Walk the lanes at dusk and you'll hear Welsh on every doorstep. Llanystumdwy did not just produce Lloyd George; it kept being itself afterwards, which is the harder trick.