Llanfyllin

Llanfyllin received a borough charter in 1293 from Llywelyn ap Gruffudd Fychan, a Welsh lord rather than an English one, which makes it unusual among the boroughs of this county. Most were planted by Marcher lords to settle English burgesses; this one was granted by a Welshman to a Welsh town.

It is a small compact place in the Cain valley, with a wide main street and a market that has been going since the charter.

The church

St Myllin's was rebuilt in 1706 in brick, and brick in Montgomeryshire in 1706 is genuinely rare. Stone was the local material and brick had to be made or brought, so its use here was a statement of some ambition.

The result is a plain Georgian preaching box with round-headed windows, more like a chapel than a medieval parish church, and it is one of the more distinctive church buildings in Powys for exactly that reason.

St Myllin's Well, on the hill above the town, is associated with the saint and had a curative reputation into the modern period.

Y Dolydd

On the hill north of the town is the Llanfyllin union workhouse, opened in 1838 under the Poor Law Amendment Act and known as Y Dolydd.

It is the most complete surviving workhouse building in Wales. The plan is the standard one: a central block for the master, radiating wings segregating men from women and adults from children, exercise yards between them, and a boundary wall.

That segregation is the point of the architecture. Families entering the workhouse were separated, including husbands from wives and mothers from children over a certain age, and the building was designed to enforce it. Understanding a workhouse means reading the yard walls rather than the frontage.

It closed as a workhouse in 1930, served as a hospital and then as a farm, and has been under restoration by a trust since 2004 with occasional public opening.

The people who were in it are recorded in the union records held by Powys Archives, and almost nobody consults them.

Also here

Ann Griffiths, the hymn writer, was born at Dolwar Fach in the parish of Llanfihangel-yng-Ngwynfa a few miles away in 1776. She died at twenty-nine having written some of the finest religious verse in Welsh, almost none of which she wrote down; it survives because her maid memorised it.

The town holds an annual festival and has a small but active arts scene, which for a place this size in this position is not nothing.