The Cross Hands Hotel is located in Llanybydder, near the centre of the town adjacent to a livestock market in a luxury listed building with a large bar and hotel, and beautifully decorated interior.

The Cross Hands Hotel has a fantastic restaurant area with an extensive menu guaranteed to bring you great flavour. Our chefs work hard to keep the menu fresh and exciting, serving daily specials and using only the best locally sourced ingredients.

We also offer a number of hotel rooms meaning that our customers can stop by and relax in our luxury accommodation. Stay at the Cross Hands Hotel and wake up to a Full English Breakfast from our fantastic chefs.

On Feb 22^nd 1849 The Times recorded that several waggons loaded with luggage and “scores of bold peasantry” arrived in Swansea to board the steamer Troubador. This was to ferry them to Liverpool and a larger transport (The Buena Vista) bound for “California”. The group was a band of Latter Day Saints and amongst their number were “substantial farmers”, from Brechfa and Llanybydder. Although well to do, they had disposed of all their possessions in order to “reach their New Jerusalem, as they deem it, where their fanaticism teaches them to believe that they will escapes from the general destruction and conflagration that is shortly to envelope the earth”. Shepherded by Captain Dan Jones, they were seen off by a large crowd, signing and cheering. (Records show that The Buena Vista sailed 25^th Feb and actually arrived at New Orleans 10^th April).

There is a certain irony that the plaque is probably fixed in the wrong building in a pub that didn’t exist when Richard Jones lived in the village!

In the 1960s the pub was frequented on Horse Fairs by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones who used to stay in Llandewi Brefi.

Further clues to the age of the building are given in the straight joint between the main body of the pub and the coaching arch. This archway spanned the original lane into the farmyard and the symmetry of the main roof is interrupted by the Southern range. Externally, this southern range presents a single storey to the South with a semi basement under. Subsequent alterations in the 1950s have subsumed the stables and courtyard.

Prior to the 1860s The Cross reputedly operated in the building across the main road, a less distinguished structure halved in size in the early 1990s for road widening. The Landlord in 1875 was John Jones, and in 1906, shortly after the pub moved, by Walter Oakley.

In June 2004 the pub was visited by some 80 Mormons from Utah in the process of discovering ancestral connections with the area. A plaque was unveiled in the small bar by Jay Jones and Teri Cook, great great grandchildren of Richard T. Jones. Richard 1819-1897 was born in Llangranog but brought up in Llanybydder where he was known as Richard Cross Hands after the pub that his parents, William Jones and Mary (nee Thomas) ran. Richard was baptised into the Church of Latter Day Saints in 1846 by Captain Dan Jones, and married a local girl called Mary Hughes Evans in 1848. She converted to her husband’s beliefs the following year. The couple emigrated to America in 1850 and settled at Utah. They must have been some of the earliest converts in the area to an American based belief that wasn’t formally incorporated until 1830.