The picturesque, remote Welsh village which lost everything

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