Llangattock

Llangattock sits across the Usk from Crickhowell with a limestone escarpment rising behind it, and that escarpment is the reason the village is not simply a suburb of the town opposite.

The quarries

The limestone was worked at industrial scale from the late eighteenth century, and the faces above the village are extensive.

Two markets took it. Farmers wanted lime to spread on acid upland pasture, which is why kilns are scattered all over Powys. But the bigger customer was over the hill: the ironworks at Nantyglo, Beaufort and Blaenavon needed limestone as flux in enormous quantities, and this escarpment was the nearest good source.

The tramroads

Getting the stone off the hill produced some of the earliest railways in the world.

The Llangattock tramroad ran from the quarries down inclines to the canal wharves at Llangattock and Gilwern, and other lines ran south over the top to the ironworks. Horse-drawn, on stone sleeper blocks, with loaded wagons running down and empties hauled back up.

The inclines are still legible on the hillside — straight scars running up the slope at a constant gradient — and stone sleeper blocks with the iron fixing holes in them survive along the routes in quantity.

The Brinore tramroad from Talybont, a few miles west, is the same system and the best preserved.

The kilns

A bank of large lime kilns stands at the canal wharf, where burnt lime was loaded onto boats.

Kilns are worth understanding because they are the most common industrial structure in rural Powys and most people walk past them. Limestone and coal were charged in alternate layers from the top, burned continuously, and the quicklime drawn out through arches at the base. It was hot, dusty, dangerous work and it went on day and night.

Craig y Cilau

Above the quarries is a National Nature Reserve on the escarpment, notable for two things.

It holds several rare whitebeam species, some of which grow nowhere else in the world. They survive on inaccessible limestone ledges where sheep cannot reach them.

And it contains the entrance to Agen Allwedd, one of the longest cave systems in Britain, with many miles of surveyed passage. It is gated and access is for permitted cavers only.

The village

Stone houses, a church dedicated to Catwg, and the canal running along the northern edge with moorings.

Crickhowell is across the bridge — the longest stone bridge in Wales, with thirteen arches from upstream and twelve from down. Most visitors treat the two as one place, which is fair enough now and would have surprised anybody in 1830.