Deiniolen Trust Fund
The trust writes a quarterly dispatch and, between dispatches, the occasional longer piece. All our news is from Deiniolen and the four parishes that share the Memorial Hall — nothing wider, nothing more frequent than the village needs us to be.
Stories from the year just past — the people, the events, and the grants made on the kitchen-table evenings the trust runs on.
Marina visited the following Tuesday and read the meter with her. The trustees met that evening and signed a £120 fuel-card top-up before anyone had finished their tea.
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The trustees published their 2025 grant summary on 12 January, in time for the AGM at the Memorial Hall. We made nine grants across the four programmes, with Llaw i’r Aelwyd taking the largest share.
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Sixty-three people came to a single autumn afternoon at the old quarry incline. Six men over seventy spoke about the quarry on tape for the first time in their lives.
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The trust quietly funded six set-text books and two Eisteddfod entry fees for Deiniolen learners ahead of the 2025 Urdd. Tomos came second in his age group. We will not say which book.
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A small joint grant with the Memorial Hall committee for a new bilingual fingerpost on the path from the village down to the lake — replacing one that had been gone since the 2023 storms.
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A short letter from the four trustees to the village, written on the last evening of 2025. Three small things we want to attempt in 2026, and one we are quietly stepping back from.
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Marina arrived a fortnight later with a wicker basket of Welsh-language children’s books. The annual £120 cylch meithrin grant has been our longest unbroken commitment since 1998.
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A £140 contribution to the Friday Lunch Club at the Memorial Hall, replacing the urn the volunteers have been carrying back from Capel Bethel each week since 2019.
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A short account of six emergency hardship grants made in the first fortnight of January 2025, as the temperature in the village fell to minus six for four consecutive nights.
Read the letter →Three images from inside the trust’s small writing-room — the typewriter Marina uses for the quarterly dispatch (yes, really, an Olivetti Lettera 32 her father bought in 1968), the back-room shelf at the Memorial Hall where back issues of the dispatch are kept stapled into card covers, and the doormat at 9 Deiniol Road on a Tuesday morning when the post arrives.
Marina writes the first draft on the typewriter; Glyn’s wife Bethan retypes the final version on a laptop for the PDF copy.
Every dispatch since 2018 is stapled into a card cover and shelved here. Older years (1995-2017) are in the buff folders in the cabinet behind.
Six to ten letters a week in a normal month; up to thirty in the week after the Diwrnod y Cyhoedd in June.
The dispatch is four pages, A5, printed in deep mint serif on cream cartridge paper. Each issue has the same four sections: Yn yr ardd (what is happening in the village), Y grantiau (the quarter’s grants by programme), O’r post (a single quoted excerpt from a letter, used with permission), and Diwrnodau i ddod (the next quarter’s events). We have, occasionally, run a longer essay across two issues; in 2023 we ran a five-issue series on the village’s slate-quarry oral history that began with Ifor at his kitchen table.
The dispatch reaches 247 households at the latest count, of which 198 are inside the area of benefit. The other 49 are former villagers who have moved, or descendants of village families, or our handful of regular donors. We mail PDFs to twelve more on request. We have never asked anyone to subscribe online and we have no plans to. If you would like to receive it, write to [email protected] with your name and address.
Four short letters a year is not a publication strategy. It is the most honest pace we have found for a village of this size. Marina, in the introduction to the Spring 2024 dispatch