Llanwddyn

There are two Llanwddyns. The old one is beneath about twenty metres of water, and the new one was built below the dam to house whoever stayed.

What was taken

Liverpool's population had roughly quadrupled in fifty years and its water supply was inadequate and periodically lethal. The Liverpool Corporation Waterworks Act of 1880 gave the city the Vyrnwy valley.

The village in the way had around thirty-seven houses, two chapels, a church, three inns and a school. Figures for those displaced are usually given as somewhere around 200 people out of a parish of 400 to 500.

The churchyard was cleared and the remains moved. That detail tends to stay with people longer than the engineering does.

The dam

Finished in 1888, and the first large masonry dam in Britain — earlier dams here had been earth embankments. It is 357 metres long and holds back a lake four and a half miles from end to end.

The straining tower standing out in the water, where the supply is filtered before it enters the aqueduct, was designed to look like a small Rhineland castle. That was deliberate. Municipal waterworks of this period were built to be admired as much as to function, and Liverpool wanted its ratepayers to see what their money had bought.

Water reaches Liverpool by gravity along an aqueduct of about 68 miles. It still does.

The new village

Built below the dam in the 1880s: a church, houses, a school. It is estate housing in effect, laid out at once, and it looks it.

That is not a criticism. Llanwddyn's replacement was rather better provided for than most of the tenants displaced by the Elan scheme a decade later, who received nothing at all.

Now

The estate is managed with the RSPB, which has run a reserve here since 1977. The Berwyn oakwoods and the moorland above hold a bird list that includes some of the harder species in Wales, and the visitor centre is the natural starting point.

There is a road round the lake of about twelve miles, popular with cyclists and busy on summer weekends.

Worth knowing

Vyrnwy and the Elan schemes together moved a substantial amount of Welsh upland into English municipal ownership in the space of twenty-five years, with barely any public argument. Sixty years later Tryweryn produced one of the defining political grievances in modern Welsh history for a considerably smaller scheme.

The difference was not the scale of what was taken. It was that by 1957 there was a Welsh national politics, a Welsh-language press and a broadcaster to say so.