Brecon

The Romans got here first, and for the same reason everyone since has: the Usk is joined by the Honddu at this point, and the ground between them is defensible without being cut off.

Y Gaer, two and a half miles west of the present town, was an auxiliary fort of around AD 75, built for cavalry. Mortimer Wheeler excavated it in 1924 and 1925 and published the report that established what it was. It is often given the Roman name Cicucium. Pen y Crug, the hillfort on the ridge above, is older still, and makes the point that the Romans were choosing a spot other people had already chosen.

Brycheiniog and the Normans

For several centuries after Rome this was the kingdom of Brycheiniog, which gave Brecknockshire both its name and its shape. Its documented royal centre was not here but at the crannog in Llangorse Lake, five miles east, dated to the 890s and burned by a Mercian army in 916.

The Norman arrival is precisely dated and unusually violent. Bernard de Neufmarché took the kingdom in the early 1090s, in a campaign in which Rhys ap Tewdwr, king of Deheubarth, was killed in 1093. Neufmarché built a castle at the confluence and founded a Benedictine priory dedicated to St John the Evangelist. Both are still there in some form. The castle is fragmentary and partly inside a hotel. The priory became the parish church, and then, in 1923, when the diocese of Swansea and Brecon was created, it became Brecon Cathedral.

That is an unusual sequence. Most British cathedrals are medieval foundations that stayed cathedrals. Brecon's is a medieval building that was promoted after nine hundred years, which is why it feels like a large priory church rather than a cathedral, because that is exactly what it is.

A walled town

Brecon was walled, and fragments survive. The medieval street pattern is still legible in the centre, with the market place and the two river crossings doing the work they have always done. Christ College was founded in 1541 on the site of a Dominican friary, part of Henry VIII's redistribution of monastic property, and has been a school more or less continuously since.

The canal changed the town's economics. The Monmouthshire and Brecon reached the town basin around 1800, connecting Brecon south towards the ironworks and the coalfield, and for a few decades the town faced that way. The railways followed, then left again: the Brecon and Merthyr and its neighbours were all gone by the end of 1962, which is why a town of this size now has no station and a bus timetable that assumes you have a car.

The army

Brecon has had a garrison, on and off, since Y Gaer. The modern version dates to the 1870s reorganisation, when the barracks became depot for the 24th Regiment of Foot, later the South Wales Borderers. Rorke's Drift in 1879 was a 24th Regiment action, and the medals and the museum are here as a result.

The connection is not historical. The Infantry Battle School still operates from Dering Lines, and much of the training happens on Mynydd Epynt, the upland north-west of the town that the War Office cleared of its farms and its Welsh-speaking population in 1940. That clearance is the single largest deliberate change to human settlement in modern Powys, and it is why the army is not a heritage subject here but a present-tense one.

What is there now

The cathedral, up its own hill north of the Honddu, worth the climb for the Havard Chapel and the sheer oddness of a priory doing a cathedral's job. The castle, mostly gone. Christ College. The canal basin, which is where most visitors start and where the boats turn. The Brecknock Museum, in the old Shire Hall of 1842, with a Victorian assize court preserved inside it.

Sarah Siddons was born in Brecon in 1755, in an inn on the High Street, which the town has never quite let anyone forget.

The national park was designated in 1957 and formally took the Welsh name Bannau Brycheiniog in 2023, dropping Brecon Beacons as its primary title. The town is the main gateway to it, and a substantial part of the local economy now depends on that, which is a more recent arrangement than most visitors assume.