In 1718, in a room at the Salutation Inn in Adpar, a Carmarthenshire printer named Isaac Carter set up a wooden press and pulled a sheet of paper across a freshly inked forme. The book that came off was Can o Senn iw hen Feistr Tobacco - A Satirical Song to His Old Master Tobacco - by Alban Thomas. It was, so far as anyone can prove, the first book ever printed by a permanent press inside Wales. Adpar sits on the north bank of the Teifi, the river running below the steep ground where Newcastle Emlyn's ruined castle keeps watch. The whole built-up town has never numbered more than two thousand souls. And yet from this junction of two small parishes, Welsh print began.
The town takes its name from the cantref of Emlyn, an old administrative district of medieval Dyfed. The castle came first; the town gathered round it. Newcastle Emlyn Castle is first mentioned in the Brut y Tywysogion in 1215, when Llywelyn the Great seized it. It changed hands again in the Welsh revolt of 1287-88, and once more in 1403 when Owain Glyndwr took it. Behind those bare dates lies a fact of geography: the Teifi here makes a tight horseshoe loop, and whoever held the promontory inside the loop held the road up the valley. The town grew on the high ground above, market square and chapel and inn settling into the contours that the river and the fortress had already drawn.
By the early 18th century, Wales had been waiting more than two centuries for what England had since Caxton. The printing trade had been forbidden outside London for most of the Stuart era, and even after the laws relaxed, no one had set up shop in Wales itself. Isaac Carter changed that in 1718. The Salutation Inn at Adpar, a building on the Ceredigion side of the Teifi but functionally part of Newcastle Emlyn, became the first home of Welsh printing. The press produced devotional and educational works in Welsh, then moved to Carmarthen around 1725, where Carter kept printing until his death in 1741. The pamphlets and small books that came off his press over those quarter-century years did not light any visible fires of revolution; they simply established that a Welsh reader could now hold a book printed in Wales, in Welsh, by a Welsh printer. After 1718, that fact was permanent.
Newcastle Emlyn's modern centre crystallised in the 19th century. Cawdor Hall, the market and meeting building on the square, was completed in 1892; the town council still meets there. The Co-operative creamery, opened a generation later, became Dried Milk Products' cheese works in 1932, then passed to Unigate and the Milk Marketing Board before closing in 1983. The Great Western Railway's branch line, the Teifi Valley Railway, reached the town in 1895 and carried passengers until 1952 and milk-laden freight until 1973. None of these are dramatic histories. They are the cycles by which a rural Welsh town keeps itself alive, expands a little, contracts again, and is still here when the larger industrial settlements have hollowed out. Welsh is still spoken by half of the town today, although that figure has been falling, one of the steeper declines in this part of Wales.
Every old Welsh town keeps at least one impossible story, and Newcastle Emlyn keeps the Gwiber Castell Newydd Emlyn - the Wyvern of Newcastle Emlyn. On a fair day, when the town was crowded with stalls and visitors, a winged wyvern is said to have landed on the castle walls, breathed fire and smoke, looked malevolently around, and then settled to sleep. A soldier waded the Teifi to a vantage point on the castle side and let a bright red cloak drift downstream. The creature, suddenly awake, fell on the cloak in a fury and tore it to shreds. While it was distracted, the soldier shot it in its vulnerable underparts. The dying wyvern turned belly-up and floated downstream, its venom poisoning the river and killing the fish for a season. There was joy at the monster's death. There is no record of which fair day it was. There is also no other town in Wales that tells quite this story.
For a town of fewer than two thousand people, Newcastle Emlyn has produced an unusually wide variety of national figures. Peter Rees Jones, born here in 1843, founded the Peter Jones department store in London. Allen Raine, the novelist whose books outsold most of her Victorian contemporaries, was born here the same year as the Congregational minister Evan Herber Evans. The Evangelical leader Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of the most influential Welsh preachers of the twentieth century, is buried in the town. Helen Thomas, the youngest of the women who died in the Greenham Common peace protest, came from here. And the rugby club, Newcastle Emlyn RFC, has supplied three Welsh internationals in a single generation. Country towns do this sometimes: small as they are, they keep sending people out into a wider world.
Located at 52.04N, 4.47W, on the River Teifi between Carmarthen and Cardigan. The horseshoe loop of the river that frames the castle is unmistakable from low altitude. Nearest aerodrome is Haverfordwest (EGFE) about 25 nm south; Swansea (EGFH) and Pembrey (EGFP) lie further to the south along the South Wales coast.