Llandrinio

This is the flattest, lowest and most English-looking corner of Powys: the Severn plain a mile or two from the border, with wide fields and a river that floods across them regularly.

The church

St Trunio's is largely Norman and has retained a good deal more of that fabric than most Powys churches, which were generally rebuilt or heavily restored in the nineteenth century.

The chancel arch is the thing to see: Romanesque, with carved capitals and chevron ornament, and among the best-preserved twelfth-century architectural sculpture in the county.

There is also a good eighteenth-century plaster ceiling in the chancel, which is an unusual survival and sits oddly and rather pleasingly above the Norman work.

The dedication is to Trunio, an obscure early Welsh saint, and the churchyard is raised.

The bridge

Llandrinio bridge crosses the Severn in three arches and was built in 1775. It is one of the oldest surviving bridges on the river and it is still in use, on a single lane.

Bridges on the lower Severn mattered enormously. The river was a serious obstacle and a working navigation, and a crossing point determined where roads went and where trade happened. The alternatives here were fords that were unusable for much of the year.

The country

Arable and dairy rather than sheep, on good alluvial soil. The Severn floods and the flat land along it is grazing and meadow for that reason.

This is also border country in the least dramatic sense. There are no castles, no dyke and no defensive geography — just a line on a map a mile or two east, and a parish that has always traded into Shropshire.

Around

Four Crosses is two miles west, where the Vyrnwy joins the Severn and where a Bronze Age barrow cemetery lies under the fields. Llanymynech is four miles north with its quarried hill and its Hoffmann kiln. Welshpool is seven miles south.

The Montgomery Canal runs through the parish.