Carno

Carno is a small village on the upper Severn where the A470 climbs west towards the Dyfi, and three quite different things have happened here.

1081

A battle was fought at Carno in 1081 between Trahaearn ap Caradog, then ruling Gwynedd, and a coalition of his rivals.

The location of the battle of Mynydd Carn, fought in 1081 and won by Gruffudd ap Cynan and Rhys ap Tewdwr, is disputed and has been placed here among other candidates.

The church is dedicated to St John and was historically associated with the Knights Hospitaller, who held land in this parish.

Laura Ashley

In 1961 Bernard and Laura Ashley moved their small textile printing business from London to Wales, and from 1967 Carno became the centre of it.

At its height the company employed several thousand people across mid Wales, with Carno as the main manufacturing site — printing, cutting and sewing — in a village of a few hundred.

That is worth pausing on. For thirty years an internationally recognised design company had its production heart in an upland Montgomeryshire village, and for a substantial part of that period it was the largest private employer in mid Wales, in a district that had been losing people continuously for a century.

Laura Ashley died in 1985 and is buried in the churchyard at Carno. Manufacturing moved offshore and the Carno factory closed in the 2000s.

The site has been redeveloped. The village that remains is smaller and quieter than it was in 1980, which is a reversal of the usual Powys pattern in that the decline here is recent and industrial rather than agricultural.

The wind

The hills above Carno carry one of the earlier large onshore wind farms in Britain, commissioned in the 1990s and extended since.

Mid Wales has a great deal of wind and very few people, and the resulting turbine developments have been contentious here for thirty years — the arguments turning on landscape, on where the electricity goes, and on who benefits. That argument is not settled and this site is not going to settle it.

What can be said is that Carno has now had three successive external economies in a century: agriculture, manufacturing, and energy generation, none of which was locally owned.

Around

Caersws is five miles east with its Roman fort and its station. Llanbrynmair is six miles west. The Cambrian line runs through the parish and Talerddig cutting, west of here, was the deepest railway cutting in the world when it opened in 1863.