Welsh Journals

During their lifetime David and Sarah Jones made Derry one of the centres of Methodism. In fact, the congregation of the Calvinistic Methodist chapel of Maesffynnon in Llangybi had its beginnings there, at the services held in the drover's house. There, too, he entertained the itinerant preachers when they came to those parts most of the great leaders of the Revival are said to have preached there at one time or another. Towards the end of David Jones's life these services used to take place in the big barn that he built in 1770 and which is still in use. I have been told that it was often full to overflowing with the crowds that came from many miles around, the scarlet uniforms of the soldiers home from the army making a brave display in the dusky light. Though David Jones's barn is still standing his house long ago vanished. It was probably a very simple abode, typical of the period, straw-thatched and low, with a few tiny fixed windows embedded in thick rubble walls. Thence each spring and autumn for thirty-five years he set out with his herd of cattle on the long, slow, cross-country trek to the Midlands or the neighbourhood of London. It was an expedition that took many weeks, for the rate of travelling scarcely exceeded crawling sixteen miles a day was the usual thing. When at long last he got to his journey's end and had disposed of his beasts to graziers who would turn them out to grass for a while before selling them to the butchers, David Jones would jog briskly home again. He was a busy man and had much to see to for he owned various bits of land besides Derry-Ormond and had other irons in the fire as well. Then, as now, Lampeter was the market-town and shopping centre and riding there and back must have been one of his regular habits. The road that led there then was very different from that which today smoothly winds and undulates along the rim of the lovely Dulas valley. Two hundred years ago it was scarcely more than a narrow cart-track, often water-logged and strewn with pitfalls, pot-holes, and great stones. The town consisted of a single cobbled street on the site of the present High Street-all that is left of it is the Black Lion. The old church stood very near the present one, and, dispersed among the houses and cottages that were scattered about the fringes of the street and straggled along the edge of the common, some half-dozen ale-houses carried on a thriving trade. They served as meeting-places for the most unlikely occasions vestry meetings, for instance, when the liquor consumed by the vicar and his council was charged to the parish funds. The Court Leet, which dealt with the town's affairs, was generally held in one of the inns and so were the Quarter Sessions. They were, in short, the only meeting-places and as dusk began to fall the warm glow in the bar-parlours beckoned enticingly and not in vain. The numbers of men-servants kept in the gentlemen's houses near by must have been