Glasbury

A clas was an early mother church with a community of clergy serving a wide territory, and the word survives in only a handful of Welsh place names. Glasbury is one of them.

Nothing of the early church remains. The present St Peter's is of 1836 and sits on the north bank; the original church was on the south side and was lost to the river.

That is worth pausing on. The Wye moved, and took a church with it, and the parish rebuilt on the other side. The village has been split between two historic counties — Radnorshire on the north bank, Brecknockshire on the south — for most of its existence as a result of the same river.

Maesyronnen

Two miles north-west, up a lane on the Radnorshire side, is a long low stone building that looks like a barn because it was one.

Maesyronnen Chapel was converted for worship in 1696, immediately after the Toleration Act of 1689 made nonconformist meeting legal, and the congregation had been meeting secretly before that. It is among the oldest nonconformist chapels in Wales still in regular use.

The interior is the thing. Plain benches and box pews, a simple pulpit, clear glass, a stone floor, and no ornament of any kind. It has been very little altered.

Standing in it explains the whole nonconformist proposition better than any amount of reading: the room is arranged so that everybody can hear one person speaking and see each other, and nothing else in it is doing any work at all.

It is normally open and there is a cottage beside it available as a retreat.

The river

Glasbury is one of the principal launching points on the upper Wye for canoes and kayaks, and on a summer weekend the bridge is busy with boats going in.

The Wye here is broad, shallow and fast in places, and it floods substantially. The village has the flood marks to prove it.

Around

Hay-on-Wye is four miles east. The Black Mountains rise immediately to the south, and the road up to Llanigon and the Gospel Pass starts nearby.

Three Cocks, a mile west, was a railway junction on the Mid-Wales line until 1962 and is now a road junction with an inn.