Llanfair Caereinion

Llanfair Caereinion is a market town of the old kind: a church, a bridge, a wide street, and a hinterland of hill farms that came in on market day and went home again.

The commote name, Caereinion, distinguishes it from the several dozen other Llanfairs in Wales. It sits on the Banw, west of Welshpool, in country that rises steadily towards the Berwyn.

The railway

The reason most visitors come is the line.

The Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway opened in 1903, two feet six inches between the rails, built under the Light Railways Act of 1896 which allowed cheaper construction standards for rural lines that would never justify a main-line specification.

It was built for agriculture. Sheep, cattle, wool, coal and general goods, down to the Cambrian main line at Welshpool and back. It ran through the streets of Welshpool itself, which is the detail people remember.

Passenger services ended in 1931, freight in 1956. Volunteers reopened it from 1963 and it now runs the eight miles between Llanfair and Welshpool Raven Square.

It is unusual among preserved narrow-gauge lines in Wales in never having been a slate railway. Most of the others were built to bring stone down from quarries; this one was built for livestock, and the gradients reflect a route that had to follow the valley rather than a quarry incline.

The rolling stock is an oddity in its own right, with locomotives and carriages acquired from Austria, Sierra Leone and elsewhere, which is what happens when a preserved line needs stock in an unusual gauge.

The town

St Mary's church was rebuilt in 1868 after a fire, retaining a fifteenth-century effigy and some earlier fabric.

There is a livestock market, a small industrial estate, shops, and the ordinary business of a place that serves a farming district.

The Banw valley above the town runs west towards Llangadfan and eventually to the Dyfi, and it is quiet, green and almost entirely agricultural.

Around

Welshpool and Powis Castle are eight miles east. The road north over to Llanfyllin crosses country that is worth the detour on a clear day.