Llandinam

There is a bronze statue beside the road in this village of a man in working clothes with a plan in his hand. It was made by Alfred Gilbert, who also made Eros in Piccadilly Circus, and it commemorates a local sawyer's son who changed the industrial geography of Wales.

David Davies

Born here in 1818, the eldest of nine, and known all his life as Top Sawyer from his work in the timber pits. He had almost no formal education.

He began as a contractor building roads and bridges, moved into railways, and constructed a substantial part of the mid-Wales network — including the line up the Severn valley past his own front door.

Then he went south. In 1864 he began sinking pits in the Rhondda, and after a long and expensive search struck the steam coal that made the Ocean Coal Company one of the largest producers in Britain.

Barry

The part that matters most is the last part.

Coal from the Rhondda had to leave through Cardiff, and the docks at Cardiff belonged to the Marquess of Bute, who charged what he liked and moved coal at his own pace. Davies and the other coalowners were, in effect, hostages of one family.

So he built his own port. The Barry Dock and Railways Act was obtained against fierce Bute opposition, and Barry Docks opened in 1889. Within about twenty years Barry was shipping more coal than any port in the world.

That is an extraordinary thing for a man from a Montgomeryshire village to have done, and it is the clearest example in Welsh history of industrial capital being raised, controlled and directed by Welshmen rather than by a landowning interest.

Davies was Liberal MP for Cardigan Boroughs, a temperance man, a substantial funder of the college at Aberystwyth, and by all accounts extremely difficult to work for. He died in 1890.

The granddaughters

The money went, in part, somewhere unexpected.

Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, his granddaughters, used their inheritance to assemble one of the finest private art collections in Britain — Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, and a substantial holding of Rodin — much of it bought before the First World War when French Impressionism was still contentious.

They bought Gregynog near Tregynon in 1920, founded the Gregynog Press there, ran music festivals through the 1930s, and left the collection to the National Museum of Wales.

Coal money from the Rhondda, made by a man from Llandinam, became the reason Wales has one of the best Impressionist collections outside London.

The village

Whitewashed houses along the Severn under a wooded hill, with the church of St Llonio above.

The bridge over the Severn is cast iron, of 1846, by Thomas Penson, and is among the earliest surviving iron road bridges in Wales.

Around

Newtown is six miles north-east, Llanidloes six miles south-west, and the Severn runs between them past both.