Llangammarch Wells

Llangammarch is the smallest and quietest of the four Wells, and it is the one that has most completely reverted to being a village.

The water

The spring here produced barium chloride, and the town claimed to be the only source of it in Britain. It was marketed for heart conditions, and the pump room and the hotels went up on that basis in the later nineteenth century once the Central Wales line arrived.

Barium compounds are toxic in most forms and the sulphate is what is used medically today, as a contrast agent rather than a treatment. What the Victorian visitors were drinking, and what if anything it did, is not a question the surviving promotional material is helpful about.

The trade ended with the First World War, as it did everywhere. The Lake Hotel remains, a large half-timbered building of the spa period on the edge of the village, and it is essentially the last of the apparatus still doing what it was built for.

John Penry

The village's other claim is older and much darker.

John Penry was born at Cefn Brith, a farm in this parish, in 1563. He went to Cambridge and Oxford, became a convinced Puritan, and spent his short career campaigning for preaching ministers in Wales — his argument being that most Welsh parishes had clergy who could not or did not preach, in a language most of the population did not speak, and that souls were being lost as a direct result.

He published that argument repeatedly and illegally on a secret press. He was probably involved with the Marprelate Tracts, the anonymous and extremely funny anti-episcopal pamphlets that infuriated the Elizabethan church establishment.

He was arrested in 1593 and hanged at St Thomas a Watering in Southwark, aged twenty-nine, on evidence largely drawn from his own private notebooks.

He is generally regarded as the first Welsh Protestant martyr and as a founding figure of Welsh nonconformity, which arrived properly a century and a half later. A memorial chapel in the village commemorates him.

Now

A small village on the Irfon with a station on the Heart of Wales line, four trains a day.

Mynydd Epynt rises immediately to the south-east, cleared in 1940 and a live firing range since. Llanwrtyd Wells is four miles west, Builth eight miles east.