Clwb Rygbi Nant Conwy
In the shadows of Snowdonia, a town that declared independence from one of history’s most feared kings more than 700 years ago, is now home to a rugby club that’s powered by farmers, inspired by an archdruid, and has a girls’ section that’s the envy of Wales.
It was Llywelyn ap Gruffud, or Llywelyn the Last, that started it all. The last sovereign prince of Wales – before Edward Longshanks’ conquest of the Principality in the late 13th-century – had retaken the town of Llanrwst and declared it independent. Running with the idea in every sense; a century later they had their own coat of arms, and a motto, ‘Cymru, Lloegr a Llanrwast’, meaning ‘Wales, England and Llanrwst’.
Even within Wales, Llanrwst still stands out. In the heart of the Conwy valley, in the middle of North Wales, it first made its money through the wool trade, but, today, it’s helped along by tourism. They visit for the two 17th-century chapels, one of which holds the stone coffin of Llywelyn the Great (Llywelyn ap Gruffud’s grandfather); they visit to stroll past the almshouses; to take river walks down the Conwy; to explore the National Park of Snowdonia which towers overhead; or just to stop for tea in the converted 15th-century court house. Perched at the end of the town’s postcard-friendly three-arched bridge, the Welsh tearoom is coated from chimney stack to doormat in ivy, like a stocky green monster, hunkered down by the river, with windows for eyes.
Across the road, next to the bowling green, is another curiosity, at least to outsiders; the circle formed of a dozen giant stones. They’re weathered but not exactly in a Neolithic Stonehenge sort of way.
Follow the road away from the stones and the tea house and you find the rugby club, Clwb Rygbi Nant Conwy. It’s not only the club of the town, but the bulk of the Conwy valley, following the river thirteen miles upstream to Colwyn Bay one way, and a further ten miles inland, capturing assorted villages on both sides of the valley along the way.
Nant Conwy’s history isn’t a long one, it dates back just to the 80s, but it’s caught up quickly on lost time. The senior men’s side are permanent residents of the top three in League One North, the furthest an amateur club can go in Wales, and its mini section is strong too. But what makes it stand out, is the girls’ section; started just five years ago, it now has girls-only sides at six age groups.
Nia Roberts was born and bred in Conwy, and it was her daughter Heledd that kicked the girls’ section off after finding herself with no rugby side to play for, having been forced – as with every girl – to leave mixed rugby at the age of thirteen.
Nia meets us in the clubhouse, alongside the club’s former men’s coach and president Geraint Morgan. First things first, the stone circle? “That’s for the Eisteddfod, they put that up when we first held it in the 1950s,” explains Nia. “They used to do the same for every place that hosted, but now they’ve just got plastic ones that they move around.”
For those not up on Welsh culture, Eisteddfod is the annual festival of Welsh language culture, celebrating poetry, music and literature. Its origins started in the local ‘battle of the bards’ which took place in the 12th century, but the official first national Eisteddfod was in 1861. Today, it attracts more than 6,000 competitors and six-figure-numbers-worth of visitors.
Llanrwst last held it in 1989. “That was actually very good for the club because we did the car parking didn’t we?” chips in Geraint. “They asked us to do the car park, a few of us volunteered, and we made a few bob didn’t we? It was easy money.”
This year, Nia reckons they’ll bring in 250,000 visitors. “It is a big deal,” continues Nia. “We’ve raised £380,000 locally to put it on, all the various villages have done something – we’ve raised £12,000 in our village from coffee mornings, duck races, things like that.”
Among the venues for this year’s festival is a field once farmed by Nia’s father, everyone and everything has a link with the farming. Even the club is on fields purchased from a farmer. “Every year Eisteddfod is growing and because of the size of it and cost of it, I doubt we’ll ever get it again. And the flooding…”
Flooding? “You’ve got to be careful because of the river,” warns Geraint, as he looks towards the river, about three fields away,
“We can be under water here some times because we’re on a flood plain,” agrees Nia. “Quite regularly the river will flood the changing rooms, [which are on a level beneath the clubhouse, where we meet].”
“It comes into the porch of the clubhouse too,” adds Geraint, “so you’ve got to paddle a little bit.”
“I live up there,” Nia gestures to a point halfway up a nearby mountain, “and the whole valley looks just like a sea when it floods. Some villages will just be cut off as it floods the road in and out – the people can’t get out. The tea house [by the bridge] will be under eight feet of water.
“What they’ve done now [to deal with the flooding] is take a lot of agricultural land and taken the crops down so that when it floods it comes on to the land and avoids the houses.”
While they do suffer from soggy boots now and again, there has been a plus side to the floods. Compensation from the reclaimed farmland on the flood plain, some of which was owned by the club, enabled them to build their first clubhouse.
Farmland, and those who work on it, have always been integral not only to the area, but the rugby club. “Everything here is agricultural,” says Nia. “There was an aluminium factory once, but that’s about it. There’s a few small quarries, copper mines, minerals, lead mines, slate quarries, but all on a small scale.
“On our land, there was the biggest sulphur mine in Europe,” she explains, “minerals used to be a thing, but not anymore.
“It’s Welsh lamb and beef mostly, the land in the mountains isn’t great for growing,” says Nia, giving us a rundown of the farming. “You can have salt marsh lamb which is grazed on the marshes at the bottom, but the best lamb is from the mountains, because they graze on grass. But it’s not produced grass, it’s not seeded grass, so it’s got lots of herbs which brings a different taste to the meat.”
“I think the thing the area is most proud of is how Welsh it is,” adds Geraint, as we look to define the characteristics of the area. “The Welsh language, the Welsh traditions are all strong here and that’s despite being challenged – you’ve got a major resort down the road in Llandudno, and you won’t hear much Welsh there. They’ve retained their identity here.”
“The club is run through Welsh language,” says Nia. “It’s very important to the club and the area – we’ve got a village around here that has 95 per cent Welsh speakers.
“This is the beginning of the Welsh-speaking heartland, we’re right on edge of Snowdonia, and these mountains protect the Welsh language. You’ve got the English castles on the coast, so the Welsh people used to hide up in mountains, where they’d be safe. The Welsh princes would hide in places like Dolwyddelan, these mountains are our safe haven.”
“Combine that with farming,” suggests Geraint. “Farmers are a tight-knit group of people anyway, and when you add the Welsh language, and it’s an island really.”
“It’s a proper community club,” says Nia. “And that’s the strength of it,” adds Geraint.
Heledd Roberts started playing rugby at nine, joining the boys for mixed games until under-13s, where she found herself without a sport anymore. “There was nowhere in North Wales for girls to play,” explains Nia “We had a meeting with other clubs and everyone said we should do something, but nobody ever did.”
Heledd put a message on Facebook, and sixteen players responded. Two local teachers were roped in, along with a New Zealander, Grace, who’d moved to the area for her Welsh boyfriend. “She speaks Welsh now,” says Nia, “she married a local lad and the fact she learnt the language shows how important it is – all the coaching is done in Welsh.”
The club started with under-15s and under-18s. “We got up to 40 girls in the first season,” says Nia.
Now they have full girl’s sides at under-7s, under-9s, under-11s, under-13s, under-15s and under-18s. With 130 plus girls registered, in the winter season, those aged under-13 join the boys, but in the summer season they play as a full girls side. “We’ve got girls in every age group of the mixed rugby in the winter,” says Nia. “From under-7s onwards, we might have six, seven or eight girls in every team, whereas you wouldn’t see even one girl at most clubs.”
The only issue is fixtures. With few North Walian sides offering opposition, the club often heads across the border to England for fixtures. “We go to England to play, the likes of Nantwich, Crewe and Oswestry, we went to Ellesmere and they hadn’t lost all season, so were quite taken aback when we beat them. There’s talk of going down south to Cardiff and Swansea to play games, but it’s four hours one way. Even now we travel for a couple of hours to most games.
Success has spread to the schools too. “Our under-15s are Welsh school champions, they played in the Millennium Stadium, so people know we are out there, we just don’t have any strong competitors in this year.”
“I met my husband in New Zealand when he was shearing sheep,” explains Grace (whose married name is Jones), as she prepares for training with her under-15s. “I was sorting the wool, and he was doing shearing in Te Kuiti, in the north island.
“I came over here on my OE [overseas experience], and I hadn’t planned on coming to North Wales, but he said, ‘come and see if you like it, so I came, and haven’t left, I’ve been here for seven years’.
“I knew he lived on a farm, but I didn’t think it would be this rural. I landed in Manchester and I saw all the houses and just thought, ‘oh my God there’s houses everywhere’, but then we got here.”
Grace had played scrum-half for regional teams in New Zealand, and went to university on a rugby scholarship, so was keen to be involved when she heard of Nant Conwy. What she hadn’t expected was the standard. “I coach regional level as well, and see girls come from other clubs, but there’s just something about the girls and this club and this area,” says Grace. “They just love rugby, they just have this innate passion that helps them naturally to learn their skills. They’ve got unreal skillsets from a young age because they want to play with the ball, they want to throw it around, kick it around, they don’t need any direction, they just want to get amongst it. The technical side they learn later, but the rest comes naturally, because they’ve got that drive and want to play rugby: to run and score tries, they’re unstoppable.”
The farming background comes in handy too. “The girls aren’t afraid to get dirty,” says Grace. “As much as some like to wear make up for games, and straighten hair, they’re not afraid to run in and tackle someone – they’ve probably done a bit of tackling sheep getting out of pens and so they are naturally very tough. They’re stubborn too, when they get hurt they don’t want to come off the field, they want to keep playing. Definitely the farming helps.
“Regional women’s rugby here is at the stage it was in New Zealand a few years ago, it’s nice to see the number of young players coming up in Wales. They’re playing catch up, but they’re not far off getting up there. This club has a lot to be proud of.”
That includes two Wales internationals, one of which is loosehead prop Gwenllian Pyrs. She first played at Nant Conwy, before making her regional debut with Scarlets, and international debut in the 2017 Six Nations. “They wrote about it in the Yr Odyn and Farmer’s Weekly,” she explains. “I live on a farm and train sheepdogs. I train them and sell them on to farmers and sheepdog trialists.”
She also competed on One Man and his Dog in 2013, so is used to a competitive environment – including the one at home. “I’ve got nine brothers and sisters and we’ve all played for Nant Conwy, so we’d always play out on the fields,” says Gwenllian, who now plays for the new northern regional club side RGC1404. “I’m the sixth, so I’ve got four brothers and one sister older than me, and one brother and three sisters who are younger.
“My dad was one of the people who started the club.”
Dad Eryl has also arrived at the club. “Well, if you want to populate the rural areas there’s only one way to do it,” he says, explaining why he decided to go down the big family route. “You know, it’s no good people saying, ‘there’s nobody living here in rural areas’, there’s one way of making sure there is. But I’ve finished now.”
Like many local farmers, Eryl combines managing his farm with a full-time job. “The only way people can stay on farms is to work full time, so it’s more a way of life,” explains Eryl, who works full time for Farmers Connect, a European advisory project for farmers. “I think it’s a hell of a good way to bring up children, but financially, it’s difficult. I’ve 25 hectares including mountain, but most of it is mountain, so it’s poor land for farming. Beef production and lamb production don’t really pay, and I’ve got 28 head of cattle, and 320 head of sheep. I’m organic too. We’ve also got a pub, but it’s been closed, we’re going to reopen it in the next week.”
What has helped keep the rural community alive is the fact the farmland – mostly owned by the National Trust and rented out to tenants – has been kept as small farms run by families, rather than giant privately-owned ones. “The National Trust owns half the villages and most of farms around here and they’ve given the opportunity for tenants to go into farming, which doesn’t happen everywhere.
“One time they tried to put farms together and make them bigger but we had meetings and managed to persuade them not to. If they’d done that, our local school would have gone a long time ago, but because the farms are small, they’re good for bringing families up in.
“With Brexit though, and the changes that are going to be happening with subsidies and grants, nobody knows what will happen.”
In 1979, Eryl and some of his farmer friends were discussing the idea of a local rugby team. Some played for clubs in North Wales already, but had to travel too far for even a home game, let alone away. “We wrote down a team of people we knew who we thought could play on a beer mat,” he says. “There were lots of farmers, so we just thought, ‘why not?’.”
Games were initially held at a local school, before they borrowed the land on which they now play. Aside from everything else that’s happened since, the first thing the rugby club did was bring peace to Saturday nights. So much so, that the local police are said to have made a donation to the rugby club due to them not being called out at weekends when fights inevitably broke out in the town centre. “When I was in school, the country and town boys were always fighting,” says Eryl, who still has seven children playing for the club, stretching from his youngest girl in the under-10s girls to his eldest in the first XV men. “The rural mainly spoke Welsh and the town and those from the bottom of the valley mainly spoke English, so all the time, they fought.
“Once the rugby club started, a few from town joined and mixed with the farmers and they bonded really well, it’s developed ever since.”
The men’s story is a good one too. Initially without a league system to play in, with their facilities, or lack of, making them a junior club, Nant Conwy were unable to get fixtures against the bigger sides.
Geraint, who took over as coach in the mid-80s, had helped build the side into formidable opponents, playing a New Zealand-style rucking game. ‘Neath of the north’ was how one ex-player described their game then.
The club climbed the leagues, but it was in the cup they really made their mark. “In the cups, they couldn’t get out of playing us,” says Kevin Thomas, a former player and coach. “We reached the Millennium Stadium in 2000 [for the plate final] and we were the first North Wales side to get to the final. There’s always been a big North/South divide, we were seen as a football region, so to get to the final was a big deal.”
“We took shedloads of supporters,” says Neil Pringle, the former club chairman. “We emptied the valley. As the bus with the players came up towards the Millennium Stadium, all of our lot came over to it and they cut off St Mary’s Street [Cardiff city centre’s main street] – traffic just stopped.”
The catchment area for Nant Conwy is little more than 10,000 people. “I don’t know what the secret ingredient is,” says Neil. “We’re outside of town, so in terms of generating income we’re in the middle of nowhere, but, look around you, it’s more than the rugby, it’s a community. I’m sure you hear that all the time, but because of the language, the culture, the rurality, this is a focal point of the community and you get different generations coming down here.”
Rugby might have found Nant Conwy late in the day, but it’s caught on quickly. The same applies, perhaps to not such a great extent, across North Wales – which still accounts for one million people, a third of Wales’s population. The WRU-formed RGC1404 side has become a regional focal point and even as recently as last season, rumours abound that it would become a fourth region at the expense of one of the southern sides. “We proved that rugby is popular here when we had the Wales under-20s,” says Kevin [Thomas], as we pick up our conversation again. “We had crowds of 3,000, which doesn’t sound massive, but it was more than South Wales, I think we would need a sugar daddy though as it’s going to cost a lot of money.”
He also believes the idea of football being the main sport in the north is far overplayed, especially by those in the south. “I’ve talked to people in South Wales, and they always say North is football, but the three main sporting teams down there are football, yet they seem to think they’re more rugby. I think we’ve caught up a lot with South Wales in the last few years.”
They certainly have the spirit. In the changing rooms of Nant Conwy, thankfully dry when we visit, beneath the club motif of a bull, written in Welsh, is the line, ‘All the lambs will shake, in the land of the Nant Bull’.
It’s written by a former archdruid [the official leader] of the Eisteddfod. “He actually scored Nant Conwy’s first-ever try,” says Nia, who has rejoined us, of the archdruid. And the black bull? “The Welsh black is the only really native breed and it lives in the mountains – it survives in all weathers, so it’s really tough and hardy.”
She doesn’t draw the direct comparison with the locals, but it’s obviously there. So too is the fact they’re just genetically made for rugby. “Nant Conwy has found a latent demand for rugby,” says Geraint. “It’s always been there, it just needed to be pulled out, they’ve got the aggression, same with the girls.”
“We try not to be aggressive,” says Nia, although she adds, “we are physical though.”
Which goes back, once again, to their primary training, as Eryl explains. “If you live on the farm, there’s a lot of rough and tumble with the animals; shearing the sheep, trouble with cattle – there’s always something with cattle.
“The thing with farmer’s sons and daughters, is they’re used to doing a lot of things. I remember when I started working, my manager told me he wanted to employ people with farming backgrounds. He said, ‘for one thing, they can brush a floor, because a lot of people can’t’. Simple things like that make a difference. You learn a lot on farms, whether it’s machinery, maths; there’s so many skills on the farm that’s will help you, in life, in work, in rugby.”
Words by: Alex Mead
Pictures by: Han Lee De Boer
This extract was taken from issue 7 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.