Llangynidr

Llangynidr sits where the Usk valley narrows between the Black Mountains and the limestone escarpment, and it has three things stacked on top of each other: a river crossing, a canal, and a quarried mountain.

The bridge

The Usk bridge is of the sixteenth century, six arches, narrow, and still carrying traffic on a single lane with priority signals. It is one of the finest surviving river bridges in Wales and it was not built for anything the size of a modern vehicle.

The canal

The Monmouthshire and Brecon runs along the northern flank of the valley, and at Llangynidr there is a flight of five locks in a short distance — the only substantial lock flight on the whole canal, which is otherwise famously level.

There is also a tunnel and an aqueduct within a mile. It is the most concentrated stretch of canal engineering in Powys.

The canal was built for lime and coal, and the limestone came down off the mountain above.

The mountain

Mynydd Llangynidr is limestone and it has been quarried and mined extensively. Above the village the escarpment is cut with quarry faces, tramroad inclines and lime kilns, and the ground on top is pitted with shakeholes and old workings.

It is also one of the largest areas of common land in the Beacons and is genuinely wild in poor weather. Navigation up there in mist is harder than the modest heights suggest.

The Chartist Cave

Near the top of the mountain is Ogof Fawr, generally known as the Chartist Cave.

It is said that Chartists from the south Wales valleys used the cave to store arms and to drill in secret before the Newport rising of November 1839.

The Newport rising itself is not in doubt. Several thousand men marched on Newport on 4 November 1839, soldiers opened fire at the Westgate Hotel, and around twenty were killed. It was the last large-scale armed rising in Britain.

Whether the weapons came off this mountain is another matter, and it is exactly the sort of claim this site flags rather than repeats.

Now

A village of stone houses with two pubs, popular with walkers heading onto the Beacons and with boats on the canal.

Crickhowell is four miles east, Talybont four miles west, and the mountain road south over to Beaufort and the heads of the valleys is one of the more dramatic crossings in south Wales.