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.

Bronllys sits in the Llynfi valley between Talgarth and the Wye, and it has three things worth stopping for, spread across nine hundred years.

The keep

A circular stone tower of the early thirteenth century on a Norman motte, standing to three storeys and open to climb. It is one of the best-preserved round keeps in the Marches and it has its own page.

The detached tower

St Mary's church has its tower standing apart from the body of the building, which is unusual and worth noticing.

Detached church towers occur in a scatter across the Marches and mid Wales, and the usual explanation is defence — a tower that can be held independently, with the church itself expendable. That is plausible in a border district where raiding was routine into the fifteenth century.

Accounts differAlternative explanations include ground conditions unable to carry a tower on the church walls, phased building where the tower came much later or much earlier than the nave, and simple local custom. Different examples probably have different reasons. Bronllys sits in country where the defensive reading is at least reasonable.

The church itself is medieval with Victorian restoration.

The hospital

On the edge of the village is Bronllys Hospital, which opened in 1920 as a tuberculosis sanatorium under the King Edward VII Welsh National Memorial Association.

That organisation was founded in 1910 with an explicit purpose: to eradicate tuberculosis in Wales. TB was killing Welsh people at a substantially higher rate than the English average, driven by overcrowded housing in the coalfield, poor nutrition and dust in the lungs.

The treatment before antibiotics was fresh air, rest, good food and time, which meant sanatoria in clean upland places a long way from where the patients lived. Bronllys took people from the south Wales valleys, and many stayed for months or years. A good number did not go home.

Streptomycin and BCG vaccination changed everything from the late 1940s, and the sanatoria became general hospitals. Bronllys is now a community hospital.

That sequence is common across Powys — Talgarth's asylum, Llandrindod's spa hotels, Bronllys's sanatorium. The county's clean air and cheap land made it, for about a century, the place where the rest of Wales sent people it could not look after at home.

Around

Talgarth is a mile and a half south-west and Hay-on-Wye seven miles north-east. The Black Mountains rise directly to the south.

Sources

Cadw, Cof Cymru designation records for Bronllys Castle and St Mary's Church.
Coflein (RCAHMW), records for Bronllys.
King Edward VII Welsh National Memorial Association, published annual reports.
Brycheiniog, journal of the Brecknock Society, on the Llynfi valley.