Dylife

The mountain road between Llanidloes and Machynlleth runs over open moorland at around 400 metres, and about halfway along it there is a pub and a handful of houses. That is Dylife.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there were several hundred people living here.

The mine

Lead has been taken from these hills since at least the Roman period, and possibly earlier. The serious working was nineteenth century, and at its height Dylife was among the more productive lead mines in mid Wales.

The problem with the site was always water — both too little of it in the right place, to drive machinery, and too much of it in the workings. The solution was engineering on a scale that is startling in this position: leats cut for miles along the contour to bring water in, and the Martha waterwheel, which was among the largest in Wales.

Almost all the machinery went for scrap. What is left is the infrastructure that could not be moved.

What to look for

Leats, which are the most striking survival. Contour channels running across open hillside, sometimes traceable for several kilometres, cut by hand.

Wheelpits, dressing floors, buddle pits, and reservoirs. Spoil tips in quantity. Ruined buildings, mostly reduced to footings, including the outlines of the settlement itself.

Ffrwd Fawr, a waterfall on the Twymyn dropping around 40 metres into the valley below, is a short walk from the road and is one of the higher falls in mid Wales.

The settlement

It had chapels, a school, shops and at one point a police station, which tells you something about the character of a boom mining village on an exposed moor.

When the ore and the price both failed towards the end of the century, the people went, mostly to the south Wales coalfield or abroad. The buildings came down or were taken for stone.

That sequence — strike, boom, settlement, exhaustion, dispersal — is the standard mid-Wales metal mining story, and Dylife is the clearest place to read it because so little has been built over it since.

Safety

Uncapped shafts, unstable adits, and lead spoil that is genuinely toxic. Stay on paths, keep dogs off the tips and out of the streams draining them, and do not enter any underground working.

Parts of the site are scheduled. Digging and metal detecting are criminal offences on them.

The gibbet

A gibbet stood near here, and an iron gibbet cage said to have held the body of Siôn Y Gof, a local blacksmith executed in the 1700s for murdering his wife and child, was reportedly recovered from a shaft in the nineteenth century.

Visiting

The mountain road is single track with passing places, exposed, and regularly closed by snow in winter. There is parking near the pub and Glyndŵr's Way passes through, which is the best way to arrive.

The views north over the Dyfi and towards Cadair Idris from the ridge above are among the finest in mid Wales.