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Village in Carmarthenshire, Wales

Ferryside (Glan y fferi) is a village in the community of St Ishmael, Carmarthenshire, Wales. It is 8.5 mile (14 km) south of Carmarthen near the mouth of the River Tywi. Originally a ferry crossing, then becoming a fishing village, it has developed as a holiday and retirement area. The village has its own lifeboat station and was the first village in the UK to switch from analogue to digital television. The 2011 census showed the village to have 846 residents.

Originating as a landing place on the ferry route to Llansteffan (the ferry was used by Giraldus Cambrensis in 1188), Ferryside developed as a fishing village. In 1844 the population of the parish was 895. Much of the village developed after 1852, when it became linked to Carmarthen and Swansea by Isambard Kingdom Brunel's South Wales Railway.

There is a school that has been there for over 150 years.

The parish church is St Ishmael's, built on a rock near the shore. A new service was launched in 2018 by Carmarthen Bay Ferries using a customized Sealegs Amphibious Craft offering 5 10 minute crossings to Llansteffan and 45 minute estuary and 1 hour sunset trips, having received a grant of £300,000 from the Coastal Communities Fund. The grant had been applied for by a former resident of the community, Professor Kenton Morgan and local reactions to the service and the culture of grantsmanship was covered in a BBC Radio 4 programme.

STISH is a monthly magazine by the St Ishmael's community for the villagers of Ferryside and Llansaint, run by volunteers to bring news of local events and articles of local interest. Ferryside Village Forum is an online source of information.

Ferryside is home to the River Towy Yacht Club.

The Ferryside Lifeboat was first established in 1835, 11 years after Sir William Hillary founded a national lifeboat service which subsequently became the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI). Ferryside lifeboat was run by the RNLI until 1960, and was re established as an independent service in 1966, one of more than 80 such stations around Britain and Ireland. It is now part of St John Cymru, the ambulance charity, and is launched by HM Coastguard in response to ’999′ calls and distress calls on VHF CH16. With the second largest tidal rise and fall in the world making the local waters hostile, the lifeboat is available 24 hours a day throughout the year. It is staffed by local volunteers who rely on donations to the service for its funding. The current lifeboat station was constructed in 2010 and opened by the Duchess of Gloucester. The service uses a 6.4 metre Ribcraft semi rigid inflatable with twin 115 hp engines, and a smaller craft. Callouts average 28 a year, a number that is rising as a result of an increase in leisure craft.

Ferryside developed as a fishing village, particularly for shellfish.

Along with Laugharne, Ferryside was once at the heart of the cockling industry in Carmarthen Bay. Cocklewomen from Llansaint could collect about 650 tons of cockles a year, and did so until around 1900. The cockle industry now experiences intermittent bursts of activity when the Ferryside cocklebeds are opened to commercial pickers: intensive 'strip cockling' occurs and several hundred cockle pickers work the estuary beds with tractors. In 1993, Ferryside saw what are known locally as 'the cockle wars': fights between rival gangs on the beach, notably between gangs from the Gower Peninsula, Liverpool, the Dee estuary and Glasgow. Because commercial quantities of cockles at Ferryside were rare, there were no licences required to harvest them. and calls for the beds to be licensed.

On 30 March 2005, Ferryside and Llansteffan became the first areas in the United Kingdom to lose their analogue television signals. Residents of the Carmarthenshire villages on either side of the River Tywi voted to switch to digital after taking part in a pilot scheme. Homes were given digital receivers for each of their televisions. A helpline was set up for residents' teething problems, and one to one support was made available to the elderly. After three months, the households were asked if they wanted to keep the digital services or revert to analogue only. More than 85% of households responded and 98% voted to retain the digital services. Hence at the end of March 2005, the analogue channels, BBC One Wales, ITV1 and S4C, radiating from the Ferryside transmitter, were switched off leaving BBC Two Wales as the only analogue channel remaining. Viewers wanted to keep this channel because it provided certain programmes that the digital equivalent, BBC 2W, did not show.