The abbey was founded 1164; the poet Dafydd ap Gwilym is traditionally said to be buried there and Llywelyn the Great held a council there.

[3] In the novel The Discovery of Heaven by Dutch author Harry Mulisch, the village is the place where the characters Mr and Mrs Spiers spend their holidays.

After a number of livestock attacks in the mid-1990s, Ministry of Agriculture veterinarians inspected a sheep carcass "and declared that the killer was a great deal more powerful than a fox or dog".

In the spring of 2012, Mark Davey and his partner Annette came across a "sickening" scene: two large groups of slaughtered sheep, about two miles apart, in the hills near Devil's Bridge.

In a statement to local newspapers, he reported that "something had quite clearly attacked them because they looked like they had been ripped apart" and that "to kill so many sheep in such a small area it had to be quite a strong animal".