Machynlleth

Several valleys meet at Machynlleth and the Dyfi is tidal to just below it. That combination made it a route town long before anyone wrote anything down about it, and route towns are where you call a parliament if you want people to be able to reach it.

In 1404 Owain Glyndŵr did exactly that. He had taken Harlech and Aberystwyth, he controlled most of Wales, and he summoned four men from every commote to Machynlleth. He was crowned Prince of Wales in front of envoys from France, Scotland and Castile. Within a few years it had all gone, and by 1415 Glyndŵr had disappeared without a recorded death or burial.

The building on Maengwyn Street known as the Parliament House is shown as the site.

Before and after

The town had a market charter in 1291, which is a decade before Glyndŵr was born and a reminder that the parliament was hosted rather than caused by the place.

Afterwards Machynlleth went back to being what it was: a market town for the Dyfi valley and the hills behind it, handling sheep, cattle and, later, the wool and the lead that came down from the uplands. The drovers came through. So did everyone going between north and south Wales, because there was no easy alternative.

The clock tower

The thing you actually notice first is Victorian. The clock tower at the crossroads went up in 1874, paid for by the Marquess of Londonderry to mark his son's coming of age. The Londonderrys lived at Plas Machynlleth, the house in the park at the southern end of the town, which they held from the middle of the nineteenth century.

That is a fairly standard mid-Wales arrangement: an aristocratic family from elsewhere, a large estate, a house on the edge of the town, and public buildings paid for by them and named after their family occasions. Plas Machynlleth passed to the town in 1948.

The Centre for Alternative Technology

In 1973 a group of people took over a disused slate quarry at Llwyngwern, three miles north, and started building. Solar, wind, water, composting, insulation, growing — most of it improvised, some of it unwise, a good deal of it decades ahead of everyone else.

The Centre for Alternative Technology is now an established institution running postgraduate courses and advising on national policy, and the water-balanced cliff railway up to it is one of the more enjoyable pieces of engineering in Wales.

It also changed the town. Machynlleth acquired a population drawn there by CAT and what came with it, which is why a small market town in the Dyfi valley has the shops, the arts venue and the politics that it has. The relationship between that population and the farming families who were already here has been variously described as productive and as awkward, usually by different people.

What is there now

The clock tower and the long wide Maengwyn Street, which is a market street and still holds a market on Wednesdays. The Parliament House, now an interpretation centre. Y Tabernacl, a former chapel turned arts centre and gallery. The park at Plas Machynlleth.

Glyndŵr's Way, the national trail, starts here and runs 135 miles east and back across the middle of Powys.