Elan Valley

Twelve miles west of Rhayader there is a village that exists because Birmingham needed somewhere to put its staff.

Elan Village was built in the first decade of the twentieth century, after the dams were finished, to house the workforce that would operate and maintain the waterworks in perpetuity. Houses, a school, a village hall, all to a consistent design in local stone with steep roofs, laid out as a piece.

It is a model village of the standard Edwardian municipal type, and it is well built. It also stands in a valley from which the original population had been removed a decade earlier.

The sequence

Farms, two country houses, a school and a chapel went under the water between 1893 and 1904. Around a hundred people were displaced. Landowners were compensated; tenants and labourers largely were not.

During construction, several thousand navvies lived in a temporary settlement — a proper township with its own hospital, school, canteen and compulsory bath house, and a strictly enforced regime.

Then the works finished, the temporary village went, and this permanent one was built for the small number of people needed to run what remained.

Three populations in fifteen years: the farming community that was removed, the construction workforce that came and left, and the waterworks staff who stayed.

The estate now

The Elan estate runs to around 45,000 acres and is managed by Welsh Water for water supply, conservation and public access together.

There is a visitor centre near Caban Coch dam, a network of waymarked trails, and a traffic-free route along the alignment of the railway that Birmingham Corporation built to construct the dams.

It is an International Dark Sky Park, one of very few in Wales, and on a clear night that is worth the drive on its own.

The kites

Red kites came within a handful of pairs of extinction in Britain, and the birds that survived did so in exactly this country — the Elan and upper Wye valleys.

The recovery from that remnant population, assisted from the 1980s and 1990s, is one of the genuine conservation successes of the last century. The feeding station at Gigrin Farm near Rhayader now draws several hundred birds daily.

Visiting

Free, open, with parking at the visitor centre and at points up the valley. The road is single track in stretches and busy on summer weekends.

Go after heavy rain if you want the dams overflowing, and in a dry summer if you want to see the gable of Nantgwyllt appear above the falling water.