Caersws

The name is the evidence. Caer is a fort, and there were two here, one after the other, in the second half of the first century AD and beyond.

Caersws sits where the Severn is joined by the Carno and the Trannon, in a wide flat basin with routes running out in four directions. The Romans put an auxiliary fort here for the same reason the Cambrian Railways put a junction here eighteen hundred years later.

The forts

The earlier fort is a short distance from the later one and was superseded. The second, larger fort sits under the modern village, and the street pattern preserves parts of its outline, which is unusual in Wales.

Excavation over many years has produced a reasonably full picture: ramparts, gates, internal buildings, and an associated civil settlement outside the walls. There is very little to see standing.

What Caersws does show is the logic of the Roman occupation of Wales. It is roughly a day's march from Forden Gaer to the east and from the forts to the west, sitting on the road system that let troops move north and south through the middle of the country.

The railway

The Cambrian Railways arrived in the 1860s. Caersws became the junction for the Van Railway, opened 1871, which ran six and a half miles up to the lead mines at the Van above Llanidloes.

The Van was, for about a decade, one of the most profitable lead mines in Britain, and its ore came down through here. The branch carried freight until 1940.

The main line is still open. Caersws has a station, which puts it ahead of Brecon.

Ceiriog

John Ceiriog Hughes, one of the major Welsh lyric poets of the nineteenth century, was manager of the Van Railway and lived at Caersws from 1868 until his death in 1887.

He is often called the Welsh Robert Burns, which is the kind of comparison that flatters nobody, but the songs are genuinely part of the tradition and several are still sung. He is buried at Llanwnnog, a mile north, where the church has a fine fifteenth-century rood screen.

That a working railway manager in a Montgomeryshire village was also a national poet says something useful about Victorian Welsh literary culture, which ran through chapels, eisteddfodau and periodicals rather than through universities.

Now

A village on the A470 with a station, a Roman fort underneath it, and the Severn running past. Llanidloes is seven miles south-west, Newtown six miles east.