Village · planned medieval town

New Radnor

Maesyfed

A medieval town laid out on a grid that was never filled. You can walk the streets of a town that did not happen.

New Radnor is a village of a few hundred people standing inside the outline of a town built for several thousand.

It was planted below a Norman castle, on a regular grid, with a bank and ditch round it and burgage plots laid out along the streets. That plan is still there. Most of it is grass.

The plan

Walk it. The streets run at right angles, the blocks are regular, and the town bank is visible on the north and east. Then notice how many of the plots have nothing on them and how the built-up part occupies perhaps a third of what was enclosed.

That is what a medieval speculative development looks like when the speculation fails. It is one of the clearest examples anywhere in Britain and it is more instructive than a successful town, because a successful town builds over its own evidence.

Why it failed

Bad luck and bad position, in that order.

The castle was fought over repeatedly through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Tradition, not evidenceThe sack is generally accepted. The beheading of the garrison and the figure of sixty come from later tradition rather than contemporary record, and were reinforced in the nineteenth century when human remains were reportedly found during work at the church.

Then the administration left. New Radnor was designated county town of Radnorshire when the county was created in 1536, but the courts went to Presteigne within a decade and never came back. A county town that does not hold the courts is a village with a title.

Radnor Forest, immediately to the north, is also the problem. It sits in the middle of the county like a plug and pushes everything to the edges, and New Radnor is on the wrong side of it for anything.

What to see

The castle mound, large, with substantial earthworks and no masonry. The town bank. The grid.

The church of St Mary was rebuilt in the 1840s. Outside the village on the Kington road is a Gothic obelisk of 1864 to Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the Radnorshire MP and Chancellor of the Exchequer, which is considerably grander than anything else for miles.

Around

Radnor Forest rises directly behind, and the walk up to Water-break-its-neck, a waterfall in a wooded gorge, starts near the village.

Old Radnor, two miles east, has one of the finest churches in Wales, with a fifteenth-century screen and an organ case of about 1500 that is the oldest in Britain.

Sources

Soulsby, I., The Towns of Medieval Wales, 1983.
Coflein (RCAHMW), records for New Radnor castle and town defences.
Cadw, Cof Cymru scheduling record for New Radnor.
Transactions of the Radnorshire Society, on the borough.