Surrounded by wonderfully quiet Welsh countryside, steep green hills, a forest and ancient Roman gold mines sits the tiny Carmarthenshire village of Caio. It only takes a matter of seconds to drive through it, and you can easily count the total number of houses as you approach and pass the old red telephone box towards the top of its narrow main street.
“A bus comes through twice a week,” one local says. “It’s fine - if you miss it on a Tuesday you can just catch it on a Thursday.” In fact, Caio is so rural that if you Google ‘Carmarthen to Caio’ it assumes you meant Cairo instead and proceeds to offer directions for the 64-hour, 3,694-mile journey to the Egyptian capital. Thankfully, you can find Caio (or CA10 as it was pronounced by one delivery driver) situated between the towns of Llandovery and Lampeter. To get the latest WalesOnline newsletters e-mailed to you directly for free, click here.
As you stand at the top end of the village, outside the old post office which served locals for generations, two things stand out: firstly, the beauty of the village, with its row of adorable coloured houses all down one side, opposite an impressive, large and historic church; and secondly, the quiet. You can’t hear anything. At this stage the word eerie would probably be used to describe such a feeling, but this feels different. With eerie you can usually hear something, anything, that punctures the silence, but not here.
