Maintaining a thriving farming community for centuries, Wenvoe, while still a farming village to an extent, has doubled in population in the last hundred years due to new housing developments. The village originally developed around the parish church of St. Mary, which can be traced back to the twelfth century with the adjacent locality now being a conservation area. Wenvoe is recorded as having belonged to the De Sully, le Fleming and Malefaunt famililies in the later medieval periods. After being escheated to the crown the castle of Wenvoe belonged successively to the Thomas, Birt and Jenner families. Major development occurred in the 1770s but much of this was obliterated by a fire in 1910. Some medieval or earlier fortification is also known to have existed in the wooded hillside at Wrinstone.
Amenities
The village has a village shop with a post office, a parish church, primary school, hotel, a part-time library, barber and three village halls. It is home to three pubs and many acres of forestry and fields. There is another church at St Lythans. Wenvoe has a very healthy community spirit which supports a number of local community groups. Wenvoe won 'Best Kept Village in the Vale of Glamorgan' in 2005 and again in 2007. It is served by a monthly newspaper titled the Wenvoe What's On. A village show is held every September at the Community Centre hosted by the village Scout Group. Wenvoe is a popular village as it is convenient for the city of Cardiff. Despite being a commuter village it no longer has a railway line, which was closed in the "Beeching Axe" cuts of the 1960s. The route of the old line is now heavily overgrown, grazed by farm animals and mostly inaccessible. The old railway station is now a house.
The St Lythans burial chamber is 2 km west of Wenvoe, or about by road, past the village of St Lythans. It is a single stone Megalithicdolmen, built around 6,000 years ago as part of a chambered long barrow, during the Neolithic period. The Tinkinswood burial chamber is about 3.5 km, or about 6 km by road towards Bonvilston. Tinkinswood is more extensive than St Lythans, which it may have once resembled, and was constructed during the same period. Between the St Lythans and Tinkinswood burial chambers lie Dyffryn Gardens, to whose estate both burial chambers once belonged. Dyffryn Gardens is a collection of botanical gardens located near the village of St. Nicholas. They were selected by the British Tourism Association as one of the Top 100 gardens in the UK.
