Knighton

Tref-y-clawdd. The town on the dyke. There is no other settlement in Britain whose name in either language is a plain statement of its position relative to an eighth-century earthwork, and it has been called that for a very long time.

Offa's Dyke runs through the town. Not near it — through it. The bank and ditch climb the hill immediately behind the main street and the best-preserved surviving stretch of the whole thing runs north from here.

The dyke

Offa was king of Mercia from 757 to 796 and the dyke is conventionally attributed to him on the authority of Asser, writing about a century later. What it was for is less settled than the schoolbooks suggest. It is usually described as a defensive frontier work marking the boundary between Mercia and the Welsh kingdoms.

Whatever it was for, it is around 80 miles of bank and ditch running from the Dee to the Wye, mostly with the ditch on the Welsh side, and it took an enormous amount of organised labour.

The town

Knighton sits in the Teme valley where the river is the border. The English side of the water is Shropshire; the town is Welsh. That has been the arrangement, more or less, since the middle ages, and it produced a place that traded in both directions and never fully belonged to either.

It was a marcher borough under the Mortimers. The castle earthworks are on the hill above. Glyndŵr's forces came through in the early 1400s.

Afterwards it settled into the same pattern as Presteigne and New Radnor: a border market town, sheep, wool, and a slow drift out of the Welsh language that was effectively complete by the nineteenth century. Radnorshire lost Welsh earlier and more thoroughly than anywhere else in Wales, and Knighton is one of the places where you can see that most clearly, because the town's own name is Welsh and hardly anyone in it has spoken the language for two hundred years.

The railway

The Central Wales line reached Knighton in 1861 and it is still open, which is the single most surprising fact about transport in mid Wales. The Heart of Wales line runs from Shrewsbury to Swansea, four trains a day, through country that has nothing like the population to justify it. It survived Beeching partly because the route crossed a large number of marginal parliamentary constituencies.

The station is actually in England, a few hundred yards over the Teme, which is the sort of detail this border produces constantly.

What is there now

The Offa's Dyke Centre, which is the interpretation hub for the whole National Trail and sits at roughly its midpoint. The trail opened in 1971 and runs 177 miles.

Glyndŵr's Way also passes through, so Knighton is where two national trails meet, which for a town of three thousand people is a reasonable claim to make.

The dyke itself, behind the town, is the thing to see. Walk north out of Knighton and within twenty minutes you are on a section where the bank still stands several metres above the ditch and the intent behind it is entirely legible.