Builth Wells

On 11 December 1282 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, the last native Prince of Wales, was killed a few miles west of here at Cilmeri. He was separated from his army, caught by English troops, and killed by a soldier who reportedly did not know who he was until afterwards. His head went to London.

That is the fact that hangs over Builth, and there is a second one attached to it that the town has never been able to shake. Tradition holds that Llywelyn sought shelter in Builth in his last days and the townspeople refused him, which is why they were remembered as bradwyr Buallt, the traitors of Builth.

Whether or not it happened, the phrase stuck for seven hundred years, which tells you something about how the loss was felt.

The monument at Cilmeri, a rough granite monolith, was put up in 1956. People still leave flowers there every December.

The castle

Builth Castle is one of the more frustrating sites in Wales. Edward I rebuilt it in stone between 1277 and 1282, one of the first of his Welsh castles and the model for several that followed. It had a stone keep, six towers and a substantial gatehouse.

There is nothing left. Not a wall, not a footing. The stone was carted away over centuries and what remains is a very large and very well-preserved set of earthworks: motte, bailey, ditches. It is a good site for understanding castle earthworks precisely because there is no masonry distracting from them.

The Wells

Builth added Wells to its name in the nineteenth century, along with Llandrindod, Llanwrtyd and Llangammarch. There were saline and sulphur springs at Park Wells and Glanne, and for a period the town marketed itself as a spa.

It was never the success Llandrindod was. Builth was already a functioning market town with an economy that did not depend on visitors, so the spa business was an addition rather than a foundation, and when it failed after 1914 the town carried on.

The Show

In 1963 the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society, which had toured its show around Wales since 1904, bought a permanent site at Llanelwedd across the river.

That decision made Builth what it is now. For four days each July the showground holds something in the order of 200,000 visits, which makes it the largest agricultural show in Europe. There is a winter fair and a spring festival as well.

The rest of the year the site is quiet and the town is a market town of two and a half thousand people. The seasonal swing is extreme and the local economy is built around it entirely.

What is there now

The Wye bridge, the earthworks above the town, and the Wyeside Arts Centre in the assembly rooms of 1877, which has a cinema and a theatre and is considerably better than a town this size would ordinarily manage.

Cilmeri is three miles west on the Llanwrtyd road. The monument is beside the road, easily missed, and it repays stopping.