If you happen to have a spare £75,000 to hand - and not many have at present - you can buy a large slice of history next week. That sum will purchase the turf from the playing area at Stradey Park, before the bulldozers move in and 129 years of sporting legend will move to the other side of one of rugby's most celebrated towns, Llanelli.

The Scarlets will play their last game at the park this evening, against Bristol in the EDF Energy Cup. Heaven knows why they stayed so long. Having decided to move to what was a cricket venue in 1879, they lost their first game there, to Neath; even when they took up the ground where the present pitch stands, in 1904, they lost again, to Swansea.

It is not a lovely place, this Welsh theatre of dreams. Up a side street, past terraced homes and the odd base for light industry, there it is. “At one time, Stradey was one of the great stadiums to play rugby at and it did move with the times,” Derek Quinnell, one of the club's favourite sons, said. “Now she feels a bit old and worn, in the nicest possible sense.

“It's like having a favourite suit that you've worn for years and that's so comfortable, throwing it away is difficult and replacing it with something new and shiny seems strange. But when you do, you realise it's something you needed to do for some time.”

So next month, the regional team will up sticks and move to the new Parc y Scarlets in Pemberton, with a capacity of nearly 15,000. The first game will be in the Magners League against Munster on November 28 and the formal opening will be on January 31, when the Barbarians, who helped Llanelli to celebrate their centenary in 1972, come calling again.

Stradey will be built over and the ground will be no more where touring Australians have lost on four occasions and, most famously, in 1972, New Zealand lost to a club side coached by Carwyn James, who had plotted their downfall with the Lions the previous year. These are the achievements, from these Welsh-speaking players and thinkers about the game, that have made the ground's name famous throughout the world.

“Where has football found more congenial soil than at Llanelli?” the Llanelli Guardian asked in 1887. “Where in South Wales is the town in which the winter pastime has become so interwoven with the social life of its inhabitants?” Where, too, does the spirit of Welsh rugby and language breathe more strongly than in the little town that depended for its wealth on the tin-smelting industry, which gave the club their famous sospans?

Sospan Fach, the song about big and little saucepans, became part of the myth, too, as well as the physical presence on the goalposts at Stradey of miniature sospans. “Who beat the Wallabies?” the cry would go up rhetorically. “Good old sospan fach.” That was in 1908, since when the Australian team of 1966-67, the grand-slam winners of 1984 and, most recently, the side of 1992, which included most of their 1991 World Cup-winning XV, have followed suit.

So much was the ground part of the community that at half-time, youngsters would be allowed on to the pitch, twitch at the sleeves of players eating their oranges and ask for autographs. “I remember standing on the 'Tanner Bank' to watch my heroes,” Gerald Davies, the Lions manager, whose first steps as a senior player were taken as a Scarlet, said.

There he revelled in the play of D. Ken Jones, the side-stepping Wales centre from a long line of players whose feats fired the imagination of the next generation. Llanelli have always aspired, indeed it is written into their club objectives, to a brand of rugby that is exciting to watch and exciting to play. Think of the long line, of Terry Davies and Terry Price, Barry John, Phil Bennett and J.J. Williams, of the mantle inherited in recent years by Stephen Jones and Dwayne Peel.

Not that flowing back play defeated the All Blacks on October 31, 1972. James told his players to stop New Zealand's peel from the lineout, to defend offensively, to test them under the high ball; Roy Bergiers scored Llanelli's try from a charged-down kick, Bennett converted and Andy Hill, the wing, kicked a 50-yard penalty goal. The 9-3 defeat in only the second match of their tour persuaded the All Blacks that, if they were to be successful, they had to be grim and grisly.

It was the day, so rugby's lore has it, when the pubs ran dry after Bergiers and his fellow centre, Ray Gravell, tackled New Zealand to a standstill. Gravell died exactly 35 years later and Stradey Park played host last November to a tribute as moving as rugby has offered - it was as though the soul of the ground had moved on, as now the bricks and mortar will do.

A sospan full of memories

October 17, 1908
Two tries are enough for Llanelly, as the club were then spelt, to beat the Australians 8-3
October 31, 1972
Some 28,000 watch Llanelli beat Ian Kirkpatrick's New Zealanders 9-3 and Max Boyce says: “I was there”
November 14, 1992
Australia, the world champions, go to Llanelli and lose 13-9, a try by Ieuan Evans the difference
January 12, 2002
Llanelli carry Wales's banner in Europe and beat Leicester, the Heineken Cup holders, 24-12
November 15, 2007
A nation mourns the passing of that wonderfully warm player and person, Ray Gravell, in verse and song