Turnpikes, Drovers and Chapels

Two things happened to this county in the eighteenth century that changed it more than anything since the Normans, and neither of them was industrial.

The drovers

Mid Wales bred cattle and could not eat them. England had a growing urban population that could. So from the middle ages onward, and at its height in the eighteenth century, Welsh cattle were walked east in herds of several hundred, shod for the journey, along routes that avoided turnpikes and towns.

The drove roads run right across Powys and they are still legible: wide green ways on the open hill, sunken lanes where they drop into valleys, and the ruins of inns in places that now look absurd for a pub. The Abergwesyn pass west of Llanwrtyd is the clearest surviving example in Wales.

The trade brought cash into a country that had very little, and it brought banking with it. The Black Ox Bank at Llandovery, founded by a drover, is the best known example of an industry that grew directly out of moving money safely over long distances.

The chapels

In 1735, at Talgarth parish church, a young man named Howell Harris had the experience that started him preaching. What followed became the Welsh Methodist revival, and Harris built a religious community at Trefeca outside the town in 1752.

The consequences took a century to work through but they were total. By the middle of the nineteenth century the majority of people in Wales worshipped outside the established church, and the chapel had become the central institution of Welsh-speaking life: the place where people learned to read, sang, argued, organised and were buried.

Every village in Powys has at least one chapel and most have several. They are usually the plainest and largest buildings in the settlement, dated on a plaque above the door, and an increasing number of them are houses now.

Enclosure

The other great change was legal. Parliamentary enclosure took the open commons and the upland grazings into private hands, parish by parish, mostly between 1790 and 1830.

For a smallholder whose viability depended on grazing a few animals on the common, this was ruinous, and it drove people off the land and into the towns and eventually out of the country entirely. The straight-line drystone walls that run across the open hills of Radnorshire and the Epynt are enclosure walls, and they are as much a record of a legal act as of a farming practice.

Roads and water

Turnpike trusts took over the main roads from the 1750s and built the bridges and toll houses that are still there. They also created the grievance that produced the Rebecca Riots in the 1840s.

The Montgomery Canal reached Welshpool in the 1790s and Newtown in 1819. The Brecknock and Abergavenny reached Brecon around 1800. Both were built to carry lime, and lime is the quiet story of the period: burning limestone and spreading it on acid upland pasture is what made a great deal of marginal Welsh land farmable at all.

Where to see it

The Abergwesyn pass, for the drove roads. Talgarth and Trefeca, for the revival. Almost any Radnorshire hillside, for enclosure walls. The Brinore and Llangattock tramroads above Talybont and Crickhowell, for lime.