It is nine miles from the nearest town, and is served by a bus twice a week. The picturesque, remote village of Caio in Carmarthenshire, south-west Wales, used to have it all.
A village shop, now a family home, closed in 1993. A local Welsh language school, originally opened in 1869, shut in 2012. The village used to be served by seven pubs, Wales Online reports.
The last of them closed in 2019, even before the pandemic wrought havoc on the hospitality industry. But next month, the first pint will be pulled in more than three years after new landlords took over that same pub, the Brunant Arms.
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Ian Barr and his wife Joan, who in 2015 won a series of the Channel 4 reality show, Four in a Bed, have taken over the boozer. "We’d never been to Caio before, and at first weren’t quite sure where the trade was going to come from," Ian said. "But if you run a good pub with good food then people will come.
"And this village is something of a rarity - it’s basically untouched. It’s very much how a village used to be 30 or 40 years ago, everyone keeps their properties looking nice, and everybody likes their peace and quiet.
"But like everything, if people don’t use it it won’t survive. I’ve been in the trade more than 40 years.
"I pulled my first pint at seven or eight years of age, and I’ve seen pubs change so much. You need to have a pleasant surrounding to make it work and we’ve certainly got that here. I’m still learning 40-odd years later but I still enjoy it, and this will be our last pub before we retire.
"We’ve lived in villages before that have had nothing, and you say to yourself that you’d love to find somewhere where you can just walk to the pub, or the shop. The trouble is if you want those facilities these days you end up living on the edge of a town."
One local pleased at the re-opening of the pub is Dee Mosley, who moved to the village from Derby in 2008. She said: "I basically visited friends in this part of the world and never went back," said Dee, standing outside her home. "I liked the area so much that I moved here. My children said to me ‘why do you want to live in Caio? There’s nothing here’.
"But that’s why I’m here - it’s stunningly beautiful. It’s just the right size, with just the right amount of people, to be able to form a nice community. But it’s very quiet here without a pub.
"It made the village happy, and there was a noticeable change in the feel of the place when it closed because there was no longer a reason for people to meet up, and even though I live next door, I’m delighted to see the pub coming back."
The boozer is set to open on September 9. "We don’t expect to make a fortune out of running the pub," laughed Ian. "We just want to make enough to pay the bills and to live here.
"Every time something in the industry changes, people say ‘oh that’s the end of the country pub’. But I think there’s still a place for them."
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