Ray Gravell adored his “Rocky Mountain home in the west”, Mynyddygarreg in Carmarthenshire where he helped friends and neighbours create a rugby club with the pioneering spirit of New Frontiersmen.
How they loved him in return, so much so that a mural of the Warrior Prince adorns part of the village's rugby club at Gwenllian Park, a memorial to a local boy whose aura of indestructibility made his death at 56 all the harder to bear. Fifteen years on, Clwb Rygbi Mynyddygarreg to give it its proper title in a Welsh-speaking community, is still there. It could be the home of just another village team eking out an existence in ever hardening times except, in this case, there is more than meets the eye, a great deal more.
The goalposts are still there, where they always used to be. The grass is newly mown, the club doubles up as a hub for the community and Gravell's bearded face presides over the field, the artwork of Karl Morgan and Steve Griffiths a constant source of pride to the village.
According to one of its founding fathers, Huw Walters, Mynnyddygarreg RFC is free of debt. Sadly, it is also free of players, a fact of increasingly familiar life in the community game which explains why “Grav's” pride and joy will start the new season by offering the village just about everything except a game of rugby.
It has been a ghost of a rugby club now for seven seasons. “We haven't fielded a team since the start of the 2015-16 season,'' says chairman Walters. “We were hanging on for a bit before that, trying everything we knew to find the players to keep going. Towards the end we brought boys in from Carmarthen and Llanelli but we still kept going downhill until it became impossible. Our last match was supposed to have been against Pontyates, but only seven or eight players were available.
“The village club is free of debt but, sadly, it is also free of players”
“We called it off. Then we had points deducted and in the end we had no option but to pull out of the League. We thought then that, with a bit of luck, we'd get the team going again in a season or two. We've always had hope but it's fading fast. If I'm brutally honest, I'd say there's not much of a chance. We have all the facilities and we've tried all sorts of ways to attract young people. We need at least 25 players to run a rugby team. We did have a football side playing on the park but they've gone to play elsewhere. We have offered their under-10s use of the pitch because it's open for the whole community.
“The really frustrating thing is that the club is well kept. Some of the ex-players came back and got the showers going again. It looks like a functioning rugby club. We have a game of touch rugby on the park now and again.''
Mynyyddygarreg built the club out of nothing. “We bought the field from a farmer,'' says Walters. “Then we put up a couple of Portakabins and got a generator thanks to the generosity of local people.
“We built our own clubhouse and played our first competitive match at Crymych in Pembrokeshire. My claim to fame is that I scored the first try for the club. I was a wing but I finished up in the second row, older and slower.''
Other clubs have also suffered, as Walters points out. Ferryside, for so long a thriving feeder club to Llanelli, now operate as a football club.
“Trimsaran, where Jonathan Davies started, only run one team now. Tumble, Pontyates are also down to one team. Others have folded. I can't see Welsh rugby getting back to where it used to be with Llanelli and Neath and Swansea playing derby matches. We've gone from that to the Scarlets and the Ospreys playing teams like Zebre. There is no connection.
“You lose a bit of interest. Somebody said the other day that with all the talk about head injuries, parents wouldn't be so keen for their children to play rugby. Back when I was captain for three years in the late Eighties, we didn't have mobile phones or social media. You'd see your mates during the week, play rugby with them on a Saturday and have a few drinks.
“Maybe they have a different way of mixing nowadays. Maybe they are all sitting at home on their phones. I just wish we could get enough youngsters interested to get the team going again.
“We've seen some good times. Ray would be very sad at what's happened. He was always supportive and I remember him bringing a Scarlets team here to mark our opening and it was the only time in the history of the game that the Neath front row – Brian Williams, Kevin Phillips and John Davies – turned out in Scarlet jerseys.
“More recently we lost a couple of stalwarts to Covid. The last match we had was in May, a memorial game for Aneurin Gravelle who did anything and everything for the club out of the kindness of his heart. We lost him to Covid and to mark his passing one of our ex-players brought a team over from Ireland. The place was packed out, 150 or 200 people and we hadn't seen that many for a while.''
At least the Mynyddygarreg club is still there. Its most famous son would cling to that as something but, unless Ray Gravell can pull a few strings among the saints and the scholars in the hereafter, paradise will be a long time coming back to Gwenllian Park…
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