Railways, Reservoirs and Leaving

Nothing in the history of this county compresses as much change into as short a time.

The railways

The Cambrian and the Mid-Wales lines opened through the county in the 1860s, and the Central Wales line ran south from Craven Arms to Swansea. Within a decade a farming county that had moved at walking pace was connected to Birmingham, Liverpool and the south Wales coalfield.

The effects were immediate and mixed. Llandrindod Wells was created outright by it: a spa town built from almost nothing between the 1860s and 1914 to take visitors the railway could deliver. Newtown's mail order trade existed only because parcels could go by rail. And the same lines that brought visitors took people away permanently.

Protest

The 1830s and 1840s were violent. Chartism took hold among the weavers at Llanidloes and Newtown, and in April 1839 Llanidloes was effectively out of the authorities' control for several days after a crowd freed three arrested Chartists. Thirty-two people were tried at Welshpool; three were transported.

The Rebecca Riots against tollgates reached mid Wales after subsiding further south, and Rhayader saw sustained attacks into 1844.

Both were about the same thing: a rural population with no vote, falling wages and rising charges, and no other available means of being heard.

The chapels count themselves

The religious census of 1851 counted attendance at every place of worship in Britain on a single Sunday. In Wales it showed something that surprised London: the overwhelming majority of worshippers were nonconformist, not Anglican.

That result underpinned Welsh politics for eighty years — disestablishment, Sunday closing, the Liberal ascendancy — and it is why the chapel and not the parish church is the significant building in most Powys villages.

Water

In 1881 Liverpool completed the dam that drowned Llanwddyn to make Lake Vyrnwy. In 1892 Birmingham began the Elan scheme, flooding two valleys west of Rhayader and completing it in 1904.

Both moved English city water supplies into Welsh uplands, both submerged farms, chapels and houses, and both compensated landowners while treating tenants very much worse. Neither produced the national argument that Tryweryn did sixty years later, which says a good deal about how little political weight rural mid Wales carried at the time.

Leaving

Underneath everything else, this is the century when Powys emptied. Enclosure had removed the smallholder's margin, the wool trade collapsed as manufacture moved to Yorkshire, agricultural depression from the 1870s made tenancies unviable, and the coalfield and America offered work.

Parishes across the county lost a third or more of their people between the 1840s and 1914 and never got them back. Llanbrynmair sent whole families to Ohio. The ruined farmsteads on the open hill are almost all from this period, not from anything earlier.

Where to see it

The Elan dams and Lake Vyrnwy. Llandrindod's Rock Park. The mill buildings in Newtown and Llanidloes. Any upland walk in the Radnorshire hills, where the ruins in the ffridd are a demographic record.