One village, by name.
DEINIOLEN TRUST FUND serves a single village in Gwynedd, in the shadow of Elidir Fawr. This page tells you what the village is, who we work alongside, and what nine small grants can look like across a single year.
Deiniolen, Gwynedd.
Deiniolen sits on a south-facing slope between Llyn Padarn and the dark shoulder of Elidir Fawr, in the foothills of Eryri. Its life was made by the Dinorwig slate quarry to the east — at its height the largest open-cast slate quarry in the world — and is still recognisably a quarrymen’s village in its terraces, its chapels, and the long retired-quarrymen’s names on the bench outside Capel Bethel. The village had 1,851 residents at the 2021 Census; nearly three-quarters of them give Welsh as their first language. Most of the village still walks to school, to chapel, to the football ground, and to the Memorial Hall.
The Scheme of 1980 names Deiniolen exactly: the inhabitants of the village, plus those resident in the adjacent hamlets of Clwt-y-bont, Dinorwig, Penisarwaun and Brynrefail where they form part of the village’s social life. We have read the Scheme’s footnote on this point in slightly different ways over the decades; in practice we will help a child of the village wherever they happen to live now, and we will help a family that has just arrived as readily as one that has lived here since the quarry years.
Pa fath o bobl · Who we serveNine small grants, one whole year.
The nine grants we made in 2025, summed to £3,104, fell across the four programmes like this:
- Grantiau Cymunedol — £790 in four grants. Clwb Pêl-droed Deiniolen (£250); Cymdeithas Hanes Deiniolen (£180); Memorial Hall committee (£160); cylch meithrin annual (£120); plus a £80 contribution to the village Carol Service refreshments.
- Llaw i’r Aelwyd — £1,184 in three grants. A £120 fuel-card top-up after bereavement; a £80 school-uniform replacement for a family of three; an ongoing weekly shop for a recently widowed neighbour over twelve weeks at roughly £80 a fortnight.
- Galar a Gwellhad — £180 in two grants. Chapel flowers (£60); a £120 contribution toward taxis to Ysbyty Gwynedd during a three-week treatment course for a child of the village.
- Lle i Ddysgu — £950 in six grants of between £35 and £150 each. The set text for an Urdd Eisteddfod entry; an apprentice joiner’s tool-kit contribution; two school-trip coach fares; an Eisteddfod entry fee; an Open University textbook for an adult learner returning to study Welsh literature.
The careful reader will notice that the four amounts above sum to £3,104 — exactly our income for the year. That is not an accident; the Scheme requires us to spend, in normal circumstances, what we receive.
Partneriaid · PartnersFour village organisations we know best.
The trust has no formal partnerships, but four village institutions are the ones we work alongside most often. None of them are funders of the trust; all of them are recipients, collaborators and friends.
Read more about each on the Partnerships page.
Y dyfodol · The futureWhat we are watching for.
A small trust does not have a strategic plan, but it has a sense of where the village is going. Three things are on the four trustees’ minds in 2026: the long-running uncertainty about the Welsh-medium provision at Ysgol Brynrefail and what it will mean for Deiniolen learners; the slow loss of the older generation of Welsh-speaking quarrymen and the oral history we are losing with them (Ifor’s afternoon at the quarry was the start of an answer); and the rising cost of heating an end-terrace through January, which we expect will mean more applications to Llaw i’r Aelwyd than we have funds to meet.
Walking through Deiniolen.
The village is small enough to walk through, end to end, in twenty-five minutes — past the Memorial Hall, the chapel, the school, the football pitch, the row of terraces on Deiniol Road, and out along the lane toward Llyn Padarn. The five images below are from that walk, taken on a Saturday morning in March 2026 by a trustee with an old film camera. They are here because a charity that names a single village as its area of benefit ought, at the very least, to show you the village.
The trust’s registered office is the third door on the left.
The walk to chapel on a Saturday morning is, in many households, half the chapel.
The new heritage trail above the village, opened October 2025.
The fingerpost at the edge of the village; we contributed £60 toward its replacement in 2025.
The bench is dedicated to the village; the Trust contributed its small plaque in 2018.
Winter, looking down on the village from the slope above. Llaw i’r Aelwyd’s busiest season.
Who lives here, in numbers.
The 2021 Census recorded 1,851 residents in Deiniolen (community council area). Seventy-three per cent give Welsh as their first language — among the highest proportions in any community in Wales. Around twenty-eight per cent of households are pensioner households; this matters to us, because they are the largest single group from whom we receive Llaw i’r Aelwyd letters. The village has one primary school, three chapels (one active), a parish church, a Memorial Hall, a football club, a history society, a community garden, and a single small grocery on Stryd Goch.
The lake’s edge, and the bench.
A small wooden bench sits on the reed-fringed edge of Llyn Padarn, about ten minutes’ walk from the lower edge of the village. The bench was dedicated by the village in 2018 to a long-serving teacher at Ysgol Gwaun Gynfi; the trust contributed £45 toward the brass plaque. We mention this because someone wrote and asked us, recently, what the smallest grant we have ever made was. Forty-five pounds is, on the books, not it; we have given a £20 grant for an Eisteddfod entry fee. But the bench is the smallest grant whose result is still visible. It is, on most evenings, the place where we send people who say they need somewhere to sit and think.
A village this size knows itself. Our job is to be helpful at the edges, not to take the credit at the centre. From the November 2023 AGM minutes