Llanigon

Llanigon sits under the northern scarp of the Black Mountains, two miles from Hay, at the point where the road begins to climb towards the Gospel Pass.

The Quakers

On the hill above the village is a small walled enclosure that is one of the earliest Quaker burial grounds in Wales.

Quakerism reached the Welsh border in the 1650s and took hold in this district. Meetings were held in houses and barns, and burials — which the movement insisted should be plain, unconsecrated and without ceremony — took place on ground the community bought for the purpose.

Persecution followed. Quakers refused oaths, refused tithes and refused to remove their hats to social superiors, and were fined, distrained and imprisoned for all three. A great many Welsh Quakers emigrated to Pennsylvania from the 1680s at William Penn's invitation, and the emigration from the border counties was substantial enough to leave a mark on Welsh place names across the Atlantic.

The burial ground is a plain rectangle of grass behind a wall, with almost no markers, which is exactly what the founders intended.

The Gospel Pass

The road south from the village climbs to Bwlch yr Efengyl, the Gospel Pass, at around 550 metres — the highest road pass in Wales.

The name is traditionally explained by a story that Paul and Peter, or alternatively a party of early missionaries, preached here.

The road drops down to Capel-y-ffin and Llanthony Priory, and it is single track, unfenced and one of the most spectacular drives in Britain. It is also entirely unsuitable for the volume of traffic it now receives on a summer weekend.

Hay Bluff and Twmpa stand either side of the top, and the walk along the escarpment gives the best view in this part of Wales.

The village

St Eigon's church has a good roof and a solid unfussy interior. Francis Kilvert knew the parish and it appears in the diary.

The village is small, stone-built, and increasingly given over to visitors heading for the mountains, because it is the last settlement before the pass.

Around

Hay-on-Wye is two miles north-east. Capel-y-ffin, over the top, has a small church and the buildings of the monastery founded by Joseph Leycester Lyne, who called himself Father Ignatius, in the 1870s — a Victorian attempt to restore Benedictine monasticism in Wales that did not outlive its founder.