About

Powys Heritage

The published output of a Cambria Sports Culture CIC research project into the heritage, history and culture of Powys. Free to read, free to reuse with credit.

Powys Heritage documents the history, settlement and historic environment of Powys: the towns and villages, the castles and churches, the mines and mills, and the subjects that run across all of them.

Where it came from

This site is the published outcome of a funded research project undertaken by Cambria Sports Culture CIC, looking at the heritage, history and culture of Powys.

The project pulled together material that already existed but was scattered and hard to reach: excavation reports, historic environment records, county society journals going back to the nineteenth century, listing descriptions, tithe apportionments and archive catalogues. Nearly all of it is free to consult. Almost none of it is easy to find, and very little of it is written for someone who is not already an archaeologist or a local historian.

Having done the work, the obvious question was what to do with it. A report filed with a funder and read by six people is not much use to anybody. So we decided to publish the whole thing openly instead, in plain English, organised by place so that people can actually find what they need, with every claim attributed.

The question that started it was a practical one. Cambria Sports Culture CIC runs guided group walks across the county, and people on those walks kept asking what they were looking at. Not the route — the ground. Why is this village strung out along a road and the next one gathered round a church? Why does that field have ridges in it? Who lived up there before the plantation went in?

Those questions have answers. This is where we have put them.

Use it

The written articles on this site are released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

That means you may copy, republish, translate, adapt and build on anything here, including for commercial purposes, provided you credit Powys Heritage and indicate whether you changed anything. You do not need to ask, and there is no fee.

Schools, local history societies, guides, parish councils, journalists, students and anyone putting together an interpretation board are all explicitly welcome. Publishing research and then restricting who can use it seemed to us to defeat the point of publishing it.

The terms page sets out the detail, including the few things that are not ours to license.

Scope

Powys as it exists now: the old counties of Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire and Brecknockshire, joined in 1974. The border areas get particular attention, because the border is the reason for most of what happened here.

The site is organised by region rather than by county, because the administrative boundary of Powys cuts across almost every meaningful pattern in mid Wales.

Method

Every article names its sources. Where the evidence is thin, or the accounts disagree, or a story is tradition rather than record, the sentence carries a marker and a note explaining the problem.

That is the part of this site we would most like other people to copy. It is set out at How this is written.

Language

The site is being built in English first and translated into Welsh, with the Welsh version to follow at /cy/. Welsh place-name forms appear throughout the English text from the outset, because in most cases the Welsh name is the one that carries the meaning.

The same organisation runs Wales Walks, which covers the routes rather than the history. The two sites cross-reference each other.