Places

A–Z of places

Every settlement recorded on this site, with Welsh forms and grid references.

Regions

Powys broken into its natural areas rather than its administrative ones.

Town · former county town of Brecknockshire

Brecon

A Roman fort, a Norman priory that became a cathedral in 1923, and an army that has been here in one form or another for nineteen centuries.

Town · Wye crossing

Builth Wells

The town that Wales has never quite forgiven, and the site of the biggest agricultural show in Europe.

Town · Usk valley

Crickhowell

Named for the Iron Age fort on the hill above it, which is roughly two thousand years older than the town.

Town · border, books and festival

Hay-on-Wye

A border town that declared independence in 1977 as a publicity stunt and then turned out to have accidentally solved its own economic problem.

Town · Offa's Dyke

Knighton

The only town on Offa's Dyke, and the only one in Britain whose Welsh name is simply a statement of where the border is.

Town · county town of Powys

Llandrindod Wells

The county town of Powys is also its newest town. Before the 1860s there was almost nothing here at all.

Town · upper Severn

Llanidloes

A half-timbered market hall standing on open arches at the crossroads, and five days in 1839 when the town was held by its own weavers.

Town · Dyfi valley

Machynlleth

Owain Glyndŵr held a parliament here in 1404, which is why a town of two thousand people keeps turning up in national arguments about what Wales is.

Town · former county town of Montgomeryshire

Montgomery

Fewer than 1,300 people, a castle wrecked on parliamentary orders, and a county named after it. Montgomery has been getting quieter for four hundred years.

Town · largest in Powys

Newtown

Flannel built it, Robert Owen left it, mail order was invented in it, and the government doubled it in the 1970s.

Town · former county town of Radnorshire

Presteigne

A town whose streets are too grand for its size, because they were built for a county. Presteigne got the assizes because somebody was killed at Rhayader.

Town · gateway to the Elan Valley

Rhayader

Named for a waterfall that was blown up to build a bridge. Later the town watched Birmingham take the valley next door.

Town · traditional seat of Brycheiniog

Talgarth

Everyone calls Talgarth the seat of the kings of Brycheiniog. The dated royal site is five miles away, under a lake.

Town · Severn valley market town

Welshpool

A market town in the flat below Powis Castle, with a canal, a narrow-gauge railway, and the only Welsh castle continuously occupied since the thirteenth century.

Town · upper Swansea Valley

Ystradgynlais

The second largest town in Powys, left out of nearly every account of the county. On a February morning in 1837 something happened here that helped industrialise the United States.

Village · abbey site

Abbeycwmhir

A village of a few dozen houses in a long valley, built round the ruins of an abbey that planned the longest nave in Wales and never finished it.

Village · upper Swansea Valley

Abercraf

Coal below, limestone above, and the largest showcave complex in Britain up the road. Also one of the most strongly Welsh-speaking villages in Powys.

Village · Wye and Edw

Aberedw

A gorge, two castles and a cave where Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is said to have hidden in the days before he was killed three miles away.

Village · Severn valley

Abermule

On a January morning in 1921 two trains ran into each other head-on outside this village, and the way British railways are signalled was changed as a result.

Village · Severn valley

Berriew

Black-and-white cottages round a church and a bridge, and the clearest example in Powys of what an estate village looks like.

Village · Radnor Forest edge

Bleddfa

A church with a tower that was begun and never finished, in a parish that has been shrinking since the fourteenth century.

Village · Llynfi valley

Bronllys

A round Norman keep, a church with its tower standing separate from it, and a hospital built in 1920 to treat a disease that was killing Wales faster than anywhere in Britain.

Village · Severn valley

Caersws

A Roman fort, a railway junction and a poet who ran the station. The village name preserves the caer that has been there for nineteen centuries.

Village · upper Severn

Carno

A battle in 1081, a wind farm, and for forty years the head factory of Laura Ashley, whose founder is buried in the churchyard.

Village · Dyfi valley

Cemmaes

A Dyfi valley village where, by long tradition, Henry Tudor stopped on his way to Bosworth and asked a poet whether he was going to win.

Village · on the border

Churchstoke

The parish is in Wales and part of it is in Shropshire. Offa's Dyke runs close, and the hill above is an extinct volcano with a nature reserve on it.

Village · above the Wye

Clyro

Francis Kilvert was curate here for seven years and wrote the best account of Victorian rural Wales that exists. Almost everything in his diary is still recognisable.

Village · upper Usk

Defynnog

A Roman inscribed stone, an ogham inscription and a churchyard yew that somebody claimed was five thousand years old. Two of those three are beyond argument.

Hamlet · former lead mining settlement

Dylife

Several hundred people lived up here. There was a chapel, a school and a police station. Now there is a pub, a few houses and a great deal of evidence.

Settlement · model village and estate

Elan Valley

A model village built by Birmingham Corporation to house the men who ran its waterworks, in a valley whose original inhabitants had been moved out to make room.

Village · middle Wye

Erwood

A drovers' crossing on the Wye where cattle were swum across, and a closed railway station that is now the best craft gallery in the valley.

Village · Severn and Vyrnwy

Four Crosses

Flat lowland where the Vyrnwy meets the Severn, and one of the most completely excavated prehistoric cemeteries in Wales lies under the fields.

Village · Wye crossing

Glasbury

The name records an early monastic community. Two miles up the hill is one of the oldest nonconformist chapels still in use in Wales.

Village · north of Welshpool

Guilsfield

A large parish church with one of the best medieval roofs in Wales, and a Bronze Age hoard of over a hundred objects found in a bog nearby.

Village · Kerry Ridgeway

Kerry

In 1176 two bishops raced each other to this church to claim it, and one of them excommunicated the other on the spot. He wrote it up himself.

Village · Teme valley

Knucklas

A thirteen-arch railway viaduct with battlements and turrets, built in 1863 to look like a castle, below a hill where an actual castle stood.

Village · Ithon valley

Llanbister

A church on such a steep site that you go in through the tower, in a parish that once held the largest sheep walk in Radnorshire.

Village · upper Dyfi

Llanbrynmair

A dispersed upland parish that exported its own people. Whole families left here for Ohio, and one minister took a congregation to Tennessee and lost everything.

Village · Severn valley

Llandinam

A sawyer's son from this village built the railways of mid Wales, opened the Rhondda coalfield, and constructed Barry Docks to break the Marquess of Bute.

Village · lower Severn

Llandrinio

A Norman church with one of the best chancel arches in Powys, and a stone bridge of 1775 that is among the oldest still standing on the Severn.

Town · Banw valley

Llanfair Caereinion

A small market town on the Banw and the western terminus of a two-foot-six-inch railway built to bring sheep down to Welshpool.

Town · Cain valley

Llanfyllin

A borough charter of 1293, a rare brick church of 1706, and the most complete surviving workhouse in Wales sitting on the hill above.

Village · Irfon valley

Llangammarch Wells

The smallest of the four Wells, selling a barium spring for heart complaints. It also produced a Puritan who was hanged for what he wrote.

Village · Usk valley

Llangattock

A village under a limestone escarpment that was quarried on an industrial scale to feed the ironworks over the hill, with the tramroad inclines still running up the slope.

Village · Llangorse Lake

Llangorse

Beside the largest natural lake in south Wales, which holds the only crannog in Wales and the dated royal seat of the kingdom of Brycheiniog.

Village · upper Wye

Llangurig

Four miles from the source of the Wye, at the junction where the road to Aberystwyth leaves the road to the north. Drovers used it for the same reason lorries do.

Village · Usk valley

Llangynidr

A sixteenth-century bridge, a flight of canal locks, and a cave on the mountain above where the Chartists are said to have stored their weapons.

Village · head of the Tanat

Llangynog

In the 1720s this was one of the richest lead districts in Britain. The village sits under a mountain that has been quarried, mined and blasted for three centuries.

Village · below the Gospel Pass

Llanigon

A village at the foot of the highest road pass in Wales, with one of the earliest Quaker burial grounds in the country on the hill above.

Village · Tanat valley

Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant

William Morgan translated the Bible into Welsh in the rectory here. It is arguably the most consequential thing ever done in Powys.

Village · Vyrnwy valley

Llansantffraid-ym-Mechain

Lowland Montgomeryshire at its most comfortable, on the Cain near its junction with the Vyrnwy, with a dedication to an Irish saint.

Village · Lake Vyrnwy

Llanwddyn

The village is under the water. What you see below the dam was built to replace it in the 1880s, when Liverpool took the valley.

Town · Irfon valley

Llanwrtyd Wells

Frequently called the smallest town in Britain. A sulphur spa in the eighteenth century, and now internationally known for bog snorkelling, which it invented.

Village · on the border

Llanymynech

The border runs down the main street and through a pub. Above the village is a hill quarried for copper by the Romans and for limestone on an industrial scale since.

Village · Vyrnwy valley

Meifod

A vast curving churchyard in a lowland valley, the burial place of the princes of Powys, and one of the most important early church sites in Wales.

Village · planned medieval town

New Radnor

A medieval town laid out on a grid that was never filled. You can walk the streets of a town that did not happen.

Village · middle Wye

Newbridge-on-Wye

A drovers' crossing that took its name from a bridge, and a country house that has been a university field station since the 1960s.

Village · Elfael

Painscastle

A hamlet beside one of the largest castle earthworks in Wales, and the site of a Welsh defeat in 1198 severe enough to be recorded on both sides of the border.

Village · Usk and Senni

Sennybridge

A village that was a livestock market and a bridge until 1940, when the army arrived and never left.

Village · upper Wye

St Harmon

Francis Kilvert was vicar here for a year and a half, and left a description of a parish that had already given up most of what it had.

Village · Usk valley

Talybont-on-Usk

A canal village with a reservoir above it and a tramroad running up the hillside. Three transport systems from three centuries, all within a mile.

Hamlet · near Talgarth

Trefeca

A hamlet of a few buildings where Howell Harris established a religious community in 1752 and effectively launched Welsh Methodism as an institution.

Village · Gregynog

Tregynon

Beside a country house where two sisters ran one of the finest private presses in Britain and hung Monet and Cézanne on the walls.

Village · waterfall country

Ystradfellte

Limestone country where four rivers cut gorges through the rock and disappear underground. There is a waterfall you can walk behind.