Llanwrtyd Wells

Llanwrtyd is usually described as the smallest town in Britain, which depends on how you define a town and is contested by several other candidates, but with a population under a thousand it has a fair claim.

It has a town council, a high street and a railway station, which is more than most villages of the size manage.

The stinking well

The spa is traditionally said to have been founded by Theophilus Evans, vicar of the parish, who in 1732 saw a healthy frog in a foul-smelling spring and concluded that the water must be good for you.

The spring is Ffynnon Drewllyd, the stinking well, and the smell is hydrogen sulphide. Sulphur waters were taken across Britain in the period for skin complaints, digestion and a general vague sense of being purified.

Llanwrtyd built the usual apparatus: a pump room, hotels, boarding houses, walks. It was never on the scale of Llandrindod, and its clientele was more Welsh and more nonconformist — the town became a summer gathering place for chapel congregations from the south Wales coalfield, which gave it a character quite different from the Anglicised resorts.

Like everywhere else in the trade, it ended in 1914 and did not really come back.

What it did instead

This is the interesting part, and it is recent.

Faced in the 1970s and 1980s with the standard rural problem — no industry, poor transport, a shrinking population — Llanwrtyd took a different route from almost every other small Welsh town. It invented events. Deliberately, and with a straight face.

The World Bog Snorkelling Championships have been held in a peat bog outside the town since 1985 and now attract competitors from several continents. Man versus Horse, in which runners race riders over twenty-two miles of hill, has run since 1980; a runner has beaten the horses twice.

There is also a real ale festival, a mountain bike bog leaping event, and a saturnalia in January.

It sounds like whimsy and it is a serious economic strategy that has worked. The events fill the accommodation in a town that would otherwise have very little reason for anyone to stop.

Around it

The Irfon runs west into the Abergwesyn valley and the mountain road over to Tregaron, one of the great drove roads and one of the most spectacular drives in Wales. Single track, steep, no barriers, and the Devil's Staircase in the middle of it.

The Heart of Wales line stops here, four trains a day.