Guilsfield

Guilsfield is a lowland parish of good farmland north of Welshpool, and it has two things worth going for.

The church

St Aelhaearn's is much larger than the village needs, which usually means a rich medieval parish, and it was one.

The building is mainly fourteenth and fifteenth century with a tall tower and spire. Inside, the nave roof is the reason to come: a panelled and moulded timber roof of the fifteenth century with carved bosses, among the finest surviving in Montgomeryshire.

The Victorian restoration was by G. E. Street, who was careful with it by the standards of the period.

The dedication is to Aelhaearn, an early Welsh saint associated with north Wales, which points to a foundation a good deal earlier than anything now standing.

The hoard

In 1862 workmen digging in a bog on the edge of the parish found a large deposit of bronze objects.

The Guilsfield hoard contains something over a hundred pieces — socketed axes, spearheads, sword fragments, chapes and casting waste — and it dates to the later Bronze Age, around the eighth century BC. It is one of the largest hoards of its period from Wales and it is held by Amgueddfa Cymru.

What such a deposit means is the interesting question. Hoards like this have been read as a founder's stock of scrap metal awaiting recycling, as concealed wealth never recovered, and as deliberate votive deposition in water.

Around

The Montgomery Canal runs through the eastern side of the parish, and Welshpool and Powis Castle are three miles south.

Trelydan Hall, north-east of the village, is a timber-framed house of the sixteenth century and a good example of how far the border building tradition reaches into Montgomeryshire.

The Breiddin hills, with their large hillfort occupied from the late Bronze Age, are visible to the north-east and are one of the more important prehistoric sites in the Marches.