I like the fact that Newborough, our local village/town, was new in 1303 when Dafydd ap Gwylim described it as ‘Tref Nibwrch, tref llawn obaith’ (Newborough town, town full of hope).   It was originally the site of a royal court – a lys – and it’s been downhill ever since, although according to the Companion Guide to Wales, it was ‘once the centre of a thriving mat, cord, and net-making industry’.   Not in our time, it hasn’t been.   When we started coming in the 1970s, it had a garage, a butcher, a post office, two grocers and two small supermarkets.   Now there’s a single supermarket and so far the post office.   But this year a café has opened in what was the butcher’s:

There’s the Ebeneser Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, which says 1785 prominently on the façade, but dates from the mid-nineteenth century:

There’s the parish church just outside and straddling the hill:

And there is the Prichard Jones Institute given to the town in 1902 by Sir John Prichard Jones, who was chairman of Dickens & Jones: