Ystumtuen is a small village in northern

Ceredigion Ceredigion ( , , ) is a county in the west of Wales, corresponding to the historic county of Cardiganshire. During the second half of the first millennium Ceredigion was a minor kingdom. It has been administered as a county since 1282. Cer ...

, Wales. It is situated above the valley of the

River Rheidol The Afon Rheidol is a river in Ceredigion, Wales, in length. The source is Plynlimon. Receiving an average annual rainfall of , Plynlimon is also the source of both the Wye and the Severn. Geography and geology The Rheidol rises in the head ...

. It is situated on rocks rich in

lead Lead is a chemical element with the symbol Pb (from the Latin ) and atomic number 82. It is a heavy metal that is denser than most common materials. Lead is soft and malleable, and also has a relatively low melting point. When freshly cu ...

and

silver Silver is a chemical element with the symbol Ag (from the Latin ', derived from the Proto-Indo-European ''h₂erǵ'': "shiny" or "white") and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it exhibits the highest electrical ...

and during a lengthy period in the 18th and 19th centuries, Ystumtuen was a bustling mining village. With the demise of the lead mining industry and in particular the closure of Cwm Rheidol mine, the population dwindled rapidly with the last ancestral population disappearing in the 1970s. This may in part have been due to the high lead content of the local spring sources. The village was re-populated for a time in the 1970s by

hippy A hippie, also spelled hippy, especially in British English, is someone associated with the counterculture of the 1960s, originally a youth movement that began in the United States during the mid-1960s and spread to different countries around ...

communities, and in recent years the population has been steadily increasing. There was a Youth Hostel run by the

Youth Hostel Association Hostelling International (HI), formerly known as International Youth Hostel Federation (IYHF), is a grouping of more than seventy National Youth Hostel Associations in over eighty countries, with over 4,000 affiliated hostels around the worl ...

in the old school, but this has now closed. The YHA sign was still there in 2021.

References

External links

www.geograph.co.uk : photos of Ystumtuen and surrounding areaGoogle Streetview (December 2021) of the old Youth Hostel
Villages in Ceredigion {{Ceredigion-geo-stub