Qualla: Newcastle Emlyn

Newcastle Emlyn: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Newcastle Emlyn: A Town Built Around a Castle

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Newcastle Emlyn: Isaac Carter and the First Welsh Press

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 chan...

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Newcastle Emlyn: Cawdor Hall, Creamery, and the Slow Pulse of a Country Town

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Newcastle Emlyn: The Wyvern and the Red Cloak

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, brea...

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Newcastle Emlyn: People From This Place

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 c...

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