Llanidloes

At the crossroads in the middle of Llanidloes there is a half-timbered building standing on open oak arches, so that the market could carry on underneath it while the town's business was done above. It is the last one of its kind left in Wales.

It is usually dated to about 1600. John Wesley preached from a stone beside it. The upper floor has been a court, a council chamber, a working men's institute and a museum.

Wool

Llanidloes did what Newtown did, on a smaller scale and slightly earlier. Flannel, made on hand looms, collected and finished in the town, sold on to England. By the 1830s the population had swollen with weavers and the town had mills along the Severn and the Clywedog.

Then the trade started to fail, undercut by Yorkshire, and the weavers were left in a town with no other work and wages that had been cut repeatedly.

April 1839

Chartism took hold quickly in a place like that. The People's Charter asked for the vote for all men, secret ballots and paid MPs, and to a Llanidloes weaver in 1839 that looked like the only available route to anything better.

The authorities in the town were alarmed enough to send for the Metropolitan Police. Three officers arrived at the end of April and arrested three local Chartists, who were held at the Trewythen Arms.

A crowd broke the hotel doors, released the prisoners, and the town's magistrates lost control of it. For roughly five days Llanidloes was effectively in the hands of the Chartists.

It ended without a shot. Troops arrived, the town gave way, and thirty-two people were tried at the Welshpool assizes that summer. Three were transported to Australia; others were imprisoned.

Llanidloes was one of the first of the Chartist risings and it happened months before the far bloodier events at Newport in November. It is much less well known, largely because nobody was killed.

Lead

Four miles north-east, the Van mine became for a short period in the 1870s one of the richest lead producers in Britain, with its own railway down to Caersws. It employed hundreds and it was effectively finished by the 1890s. The engine houses and spoil are still there.

What is there now

The market hall. Two churches, of which St Idloes has a nave arcade brought from Abbeycwmhir after the abbey was dissolved. The mill buildings along the river. A town that is small, self-contained and noticeably independent-minded, which given the history is not much of a surprise.

The Severn is a few miles from its source here and small enough to step across in places. Llyn Clywedog, the reservoir above the town, was built in the 1960s to regulate the river's flow downstream rather than to supply water, which makes it a different kind of scheme from Elan or Vyrnwy and one that drowned far less.

Glyndŵr's Way and the Severn Way both pass through, which brings walkers in, which is a reasonable amount of what the town now runs on.