Llandrindod Wells

Llandrindod is the administrative centre of the largest county in Wales, and in 1860 it was a church, a few farms and some springs that smelled of sulphur.

Everything else is Victorian, and it is Victorian all at once, which is why the town looks the way it does. Wide streets, long terraces of red and yellow brick, deep bay windows, hotels with more storeys than anything around them, and a formal park with a pump house in it. Almost nothing in the centre predates 1865 and almost nothing postdates 1914.

Why here

The water. There were mineral springs at Llandrindod known locally for a long time, and there had been a modest and rather disreputable spa here in the eighteenth century, which apparently closed because of the company it attracted rather than because the water stopped working.

What changed everything was the railway. The Central Wales line reached the town in the middle 1860s, which meant the industrial populations of the west midlands and south Wales could get here in a day. Saline, sulphur, magnesium and chalybeate springs were all available within walking distance of a station.

The town was built, deliberately and quickly, to take advantage of that. Speculative builders put up hotels and boarding houses, the springs were enclosed and dressed with pump rooms and pavilions, and by the 1890s Llandrindod was handling something in the order of eighty thousand visitors a season.

The end of it

1914 finished the spa trade in Britain generally and Llandrindod specifically. Some of it came back between the wars, on a smaller scale, and then the National Health Service made the whole model redundant: if treatment was free at a hospital, paying to drink sulphur water in a Welsh resort was a hobby rather than medicine.

The town was left with the buildings. Which is why it now has hotel capacity, assembly space and civic architecture out of all proportion to its size.

Becoming the county town

That surplus turned out to be useful. Radnorshire County Council had met at Presteigne, but Llandrindod was central, it had the railway, and it had rooms. County administration moved here around the turn of the twentieth century.

Then in 1974 Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire and Brecknockshire were merged into Powys, and a new county needed a headquarters. Brecon and Newtown both had better claims on population and history. Llandrindod had geography — it is close to the middle of a very large county — and, again, it had the buildings.

So the administrative centre of Powys is a town that was invented to sell water, sustained by a railway that Beeching somehow did not close, and repurposed twice for reasons that had nothing to do with why it was built.

Castell Collen

Two miles north-west at Llanyre, on a bluff above the Ithon, is a Roman auxiliary fort occupied on and off for around three centuries from the late first century AD. It was reduced in size at some point, which is visible in the earthworks, and it sits on the road running north from Y Gaer at Brecon.

It is a reminder that the Romans found reasons to be in this valley seventeen hundred years before anyone thought to bottle the water.

What is there now

Rock Park, with the pump house and the surviving spring, now a café and treatment rooms rather than a cure. The lake, dug in 1870 as an ornamental feature and now the town's most photographed asset. The National Cycle Museum in the Automobile Palace, a genuinely odd and genuinely good collection.

Every September the town runs a Victorian Festival, which sounds like the sort of thing that could be embarrassing and is mostly not, largely because the setting does the work.