There’s no room at the inn in Bethlehem, Carmarthenshire. Because there’s no inn. No shops. Only a former post office turned private residence. I can see a few barns, but there’s not much else in this tiny linear village. The official population is almost 200, though only a few dozen live in the centre. There’s a primary school that closed in 1999 and now serves as the village hall. Some people still come to post Christmas cards here to get the local postmark, organised by a small local group who stamp the envelopes that can then be posted in a little red postbox by the village hall.
I find the chapel, first built in 1800, down a side road, a couple of hundred yards to the south. The settlement was originally called Dyffryn Ceidrich (Ceidrich’s Valley), but after the chapel was baptised Bethlehem – a common enough name for a house of worship in Wales during its nonconformist heyday – it came to denote the area too. The stone building is tall and austere, with long, thin windows; it would have been the focal point of community life and – as any reader of Caradoc Evans’ My People will know – quite possibly a hotbed of sin, prejudice and hypocrisy. There are some weathered gravestones, with a smattering of Thomases, Davieses and Joneses, and in the morning mist it’s quite atmospheric.
