Pant y Wennol and the Holy City.
11th June 2026
This evening’s off Orme walk was around Pant y Wennol and Penrhynside. Meeting at the ‘Llandudno Welcomes You’ sign we passed Bryn Ifan, and seeing a photo of this once thatched cottage, we continued to the former home of Harry Wartski – the Llandudno jeweller famous for collecting the work of Carl Faberge – jeweller to the Russian Tsars. After seeing where the old Colwyn Bay and Llandudno Tramway used to enter Bodafon Fields we followed the narrow road behind Bodafon School which opened under the sponsorship of Lady Augusta Mostyn in April 1872.
Hard to believe now but in the nineteenth century, the hamlet of Pant y Wennol was a decent sized community of about seventy people living in fourteen dwellings. These houses have now either been merged into larger ones or abandoned altogether and now there are just four. In a cave below the footpath, the leg bone of a woolly rhinoceros thought to be around 22,000 years old, five Neolithic human remains as well as deer, hyena, bison and wolf bones were found by an amateur archaeologist.
Crossing over Pant, we descended into the ‘Holy City’ of Penrhynside. Its nickname came about due to the five places of worship built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as the village expanded to house the growing population of Little Orme quarrymen. All the chapels have now closed along with the village shops with just the two pubs remaining. Descending through the village we passed Graiglwyd Bach which retains some of its eighteenth-century character from a time when there were only a few isolated farms in this area. Before returning to the start point, we paused at Penrhynside war memorial which was unveiled in June 1921 and commemorates the 22 men of the village killed in the First World War and one who died during the Second World War. Seven of the fallen lived on the same street – remarkable considering there are only 14 properties in that row of terraces.
Many thanks to Adrian for leading this walk and thanks to Christine for the fantastic photo's.