A sweeping new mural celebrating the history and characters of Pontyates has been completed — and tucked among the miners, dragons and Welsh legends is a face every soap fan will recognise.
The artwork stretches the length of the wall beside the rugby club in the Gwendraeth Valley village, and was painted by artist Steve Jenkins, who works as Jenks.
Years in the making
The project was a long time coming. Jenks was first approached by a local community group around four years ago to look at painting the wall.
“This would be a huge price to do all of this,” he recalled telling them at the time, given the sheer size of the wall. “And I gave them a quote, and that was the end of it.”
But the group — Pontyates Community Improvement, or Gwella Cymuned Pontiets — did not give up. Over the following years they held a string of fundraising activities, including an annual party on the pitch, until they had raised enough to pay for the whole thing.
Jenks only realised it was really happening when he drove past one day on his way to Carmarthen and saw the wall had been painted white, ready for him.
Designed by the village’s children
Rather than decide the content himself, Jenks went into two of the village’s schools to ask the pupils what they wanted to see.
“There’s no bad ideas,” he told them during the brainstorming sessions. The result is a wall packed with detail, much of it drawn straight from the children’s imaginations.
A strong theme of community ran through the children’s ideas — fitting for a spot with a hard-won recent story of its own.
This part of Pontyates was historically known as Sarn, a name carried today by the village’s GP surgery, Meddygfa’r Sarn, which sits just across from the park where the mural is painted. The practice was saved from closure earlier this year after a determined community campaign — and the “Y Sarn” name even appears on a painted signpost within the mural itself.
There are nods to the village’s mining past, with a miner in his helmet, a colliery winding tower and figures walking home from the pit.
The canal that once ran through Pontyates is there too, shown alongside the railway that replaced it — a steam train hauling coal where narrowboats once carried it.
(Image: Swansea Bay News)
Welsh legend gets a look in with Twrch Trwyth, the wild boar of the Mabinogion, while a willow tree, Welsh poppies and daffodils fill out the scene.
There is rugby, naturally, with a player in the black of Pontyates RFC and the club’s crest, and a Welsh dragon curls across one end of the wall.
(Image: Swansea Bay News)
An inside joke and a soap legend
Some details reward a closer look. One signpost appears, at first glance, to have been vandalised — pointing to “Pentre Hyn” and “Pentre Draw” — but it is in fact a gentle local in-joke.
The names mean roughly “this side” and “that side” of the village, and villagers traditionally use them depending on where they happen to be standing — so wherever you are, the other part of the village is always “the other side.”
(Image: Swansea Bay News)
Then there is Dot Cotton. The beloved EastEnders character, played by the late June Brown, was suggested by pupils at Ysgol Pontyates — and she has a genuine link to the village.
June Brown was evacuated to Pontyates during the Second World War, a connection that made the much-loved launderette legend a fitting, if unexpected, addition to the wall.
(Image: Swansea Bay News)
From furloughed to full-time
For Jenks, the mural is part of a journey that began during the pandemic. A keen follower of hip-hop and graffiti art, he had long wanted to paint for a living but never thought it possible.
Furloughed from his factory job during lockdown, with paint and time on his hands, he went out and painted a couple of NHS tribute murals — and the response took off from there.
He kept his factory job for another year, but the requests kept coming, and eventually he decided to take the plunge and paint full-time. That was four years ago.
Since then his community murals have appeared across the area, including a five-panel artwork on the seafront in Llanelli and a tribute in Port Talbot to the late father of actor Michael Sheen.
He described the Pontyates mural as his “gift to the community” — and said the response had already created a buzz, with people heading up to the wall to take photographs beside it.
“The more you go up to it, the more you’ll spot things,” he said. “That’s what I’m hoping.”
