Clearance, Closure and Powys

Four things happened to Powys in the twentieth century, and all four were decided elsewhere.

The clearance

In spring 1940 the War Office served notice on the farms of Mynydd Epynt. Around fifty-four holdings and some two hundred people were removed in a single season and the upland became the Sennybridge Training Area, which it remains.

Unlike most wartime requisition it was never returned. The Ministry of Defence still holds around 31,000 acres. A Welsh-speaking farming community that had been there for generations was dispersed, the language boundary in Breconshire moved several miles west, and it has not moved back.

The closures

The railways that arrived in the 1860s left in the 1960s. The Mid-Wales line closed in 1962, the Brecon and Merthyr with it. Brecon, a town of eight thousand, has had no station since. Dozens of smaller stations went the same way.

The Heart of Wales line survived, four trains a day, and remains the only rail route through the middle of the county.

What closed alongside the railways was much of the rest: village schools, branch banks, cottage hospitals, chapels. The pattern of the second half of the century is consolidation into the larger towns and steady withdrawal from everywhere else.

The county

On 1 April 1974 Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire and Brecknockshire ceased to exist as administrative counties and Powys was created from all three. The new county was the largest in Wales by area and among the smallest by population.

Llandrindod Wells became the county town, being roughly central and having the buildings. Nobody has ever entirely stopped using the old county names, and the historic counties remain the categories most people in Powys actually think in.

The land

Two changes altered the look of the county more than anything since enclosure. The Forestry Commission planted conifers on tens of thousands of acres of upland from the 1920s onward, mostly Sitka spruce, mostly in blocks with straight edges. And the Brecon Beacons National Park was designated in 1957, which put planning control over the whole southern third of the county and shaped what could be built there.

The park formally took the name Bannau Brycheiniog as its primary title in 2023.

The language

At the start of the century a majority of people in Brecknockshire and Montgomeryshire spoke Welsh. By its end the figure was well under a fifth in most of the county, with Radnorshire having lost the language almost entirely much earlier.

The exceptions matter. The Tanat and Vyrnwy valleys in the north, and the upper Swansea Valley around Ystradgynlais in the south-west, held on and still do. Ystradgynlais is now the most strongly Welsh-speaking town in Powys, which surprises most people, including a good many in Powys.

Where to see it

The Epynt Way, which circles the training area and is the only legal access to most of that ground. Y Babell chapel, restored, within it.

Any of the closed railway alignments, several of which are now paths.

The Forestry Commission blocks on the Radnor and Berwyn uplands, and the older field walls running underneath them.