'One local left' in village so stunning nearly all houses are millionaires' second homes

When Norman Thomas moved to this beautiful coastal village 55 years ago, it was a thriving community with farms and shops and five busy pubs.

But most of his neighbouring houses have been bought as second homes by outsiders drawn by its award-winning beaches and near-Mediterranean micro-climate. Now the 88-year-old widower says he is the only Welshman left in Cwm-yr-Eglwys on the Pembrokeshire coast, and one of only a handful of year-round residents.

When summer ends, Norman says his neighbours return to their urban homes, leaving the village eerily quiet for most of the year. The retired boat club steward said: “Ten years ago it started going rough – there were no lights at night in the houses. "It looks so dark and cold in the winter because there’s not many people.

“You don’t see anybody, you can drive up the road with your eyes shut because there’s nobody on the road. There are three houses occupied and I’m the only ‘local, local’.” Norman lives in a four-bed home overlooking the beach that has been in his late wife’s family since 1919.

He moved there in the 1960s and raised his four children there. Of around 50 properties in the village, most are now holiday homes and a third are thought to be worth over a million pounds. One reportedly sold privately for £1.3million recently, nearly seven times the national average.

But Norman claims he is the last Welsh speaker there, saying: “You don’t hear a word of it spoken here now. I speak Welsh to everybody!” The only other two permanent residents, Elizabeth and Harry Broughton, are also in their eighties and came to the village from Lancashire in 1968.

Norman has nothing against the holidaymakers. He said: “They’re not doing any damage – in fact, they spend a lot of money here building better houses. We know everybody who comes here. They’re all nice people.” But he added: “There’s no work here at all, but there used to be when I was younger.

"We had 62 farms sprawled out in the parish, and now there’s not a single milk producer. They’ve all given up because they couldn’t make it pay. A lot of the smaller farms have closed and they’ve all joined to make bigger units. There used to be four or five grocers in the village – there’s two now. There was an ironmonger here, that’s gone. There were five pubs here and now there are only two. I’ve got a friend who has to travel about 40 miles a day to find work. In the winter they’re really suffering.”

A version of this article was first published in June, 2021.