Llangynog

The road up the Tanat valley ends at Llangynog, under the crag of Craig Rhiwarth, and there is no way out except over the Berwyn.

That dead-end position did not stop this being, for about thirty years in the early eighteenth century, one of the most productive lead districts in Britain.

The lead

The mines here were worked from the seventeenth century and hit their peak in the 1720s and 1730s under the Powis estate, which owned them and made a very large amount of money from them. Ore was carted down the valley and eventually to the smelters.

The workforce came from across mid Wales and beyond, and the village swelled and then shrank again as the richest ground was worked out.

Later the same mountain was quarried for slate, which kept some employment going into the twentieth century.

Craig Rhiwarth carries an Iron Age hillfort on top of it, one of the larger ones in the county, so people have been finding reasons to be on that hill for well over two thousand years.

What to look for

Spoil, extensively, on the slopes above the village. Quarry inclines. Adits and levels driven into the crag. Ruined buildings and processing floors.

The usual warnings apply and apply strongly here: shafts, unstable adits, and lead spoil that should not be handled. Stay on the paths.

Pennant Melangell

Two miles up the side valley to the west is one of the most remarkable churches in Wales.

Pennant Melangell is a small church at the head of a dead-end valley containing the restored shrine of St Melangell, a twelfth-century structure and the earliest surviving Romanesque shrine in northern Europe. It was dismantled at the Reformation, its stones built into the church fabric, and reassembled in the twentieth century.

Melangell is said to have been an Irish princess who fled to the valley to live as a hermit, and to have sheltered a hare from a prince's hunt, whereupon the hounds refused to advance and the prince granted her the valley as a sanctuary.

The valley is quiet, the yews in the churchyard are very old, and it is one of very few places in Powys that people still visit as pilgrims rather than as tourists.

Now

A small village with a pub, at the foot of the Berwyn and at the start of the walk up onto Cadair Berwyn and Moel Sych. The road over the mountain to Bala is spectacular and frequently closed in winter.