Crickhowell

The flat-topped hill above the town is called Table Mountain in English and Crug Hywel in Welsh, and it carries an Iron Age hillfort. The town at the bottom took its name from it. That is a straightforward relationship and it is worth noticing, because it means the oldest thing in the neighbourhood is also the thing everybody looks at.

The Hywel of the name is sometimes identified with Hywel Dda, the tenth-century king and lawgiver.

The bridge

Crickhowell's bridge over the Usk is the longest stone bridge in Wales and it has an oddity that visitors keep rediscovering: it has thirteen arches when you look from upstream and twelve from downstream. Widening at different periods on the two sides left one arch buried on the eastern face.

It is medieval in origin, rebuilt and widened repeatedly, and it is the reason the town is where it is.

The castle and the court

Crickhowell Castle is a fragment: a motte with the stub of a shell keep and two towers, in a public park in the middle of the town. It was slighted, probably during the Glyndŵr revolt in the early 1400s, and never rebuilt.

The building that matters is two and a half miles north-west at Tretower. Tretower Castle is a Norman motte with a circular keep of the early thirteenth century. Beside it stands Tretower Court, a late medieval fortified manor house that was built when the castle became unlivable and the family wanted comfort rather than defence.

Having the two next to each other, in one field, is the clearest illustration in Wales of that transition. You can walk from one to the other in ninety seconds and see two entirely different ideas about what a gentleman's house is for.

Everest

Sir George Everest was born in 1790 at Gwernvale, on the western edge of Crickhowell. He became Surveyor General of India and ran the Great Trigonometrical Survey, which measured the subcontinent to a precision nobody had previously managed.

The mountain was named after him in 1865, by his successor, over his own objection: he pointed out that it already had local names and that Welsh speakers could not readily pronounce his surname anyway. He pronounced it "Eve-rest".

Gwernvale is now a hotel. There is a Bronze Age chambered tomb in its grounds, which nobody expects.

Limestone

Across the river at Llangattock the escarpment is cut with quarries, lime kilns and the inclines of the Brinore and Llangattock tramroads, built to take limestone down to the canal at Talybont and Gilwern and thence to the ironworks at Blaenavon and Nantyglo.

Those tramroads are among the earliest railways in the world in any meaningful sense, and walking one is the fastest way to understand how the iron industry in the valleys to the south was actually supplied.

What is there now

A small prosperous town with a food reputation, a good bookshop and more walkers than residents on a Saturday. The bridge. The castle in the park. Tretower up the road.

And Table Mountain, which is an hour up and worth every minute of it, with the whole Usk valley laid out below and the ramparts of the fort still legible under the grass.