Newbridge-on-Wye

The Wye between Rhayader and Builth is crossable in only a handful of places, and this is one of them. Everything about the village follows from that.

Cattle came down off the Radnorshire hills and out of the Elan country and crossed here on the way east. The village name records the bridge that eventually replaced the ford, and the roads converging on it are older than anything standing.

Llysdinam

On the west bank is Llysdinam Hall, a country house of the nineteenth century in older grounds, held by the Venables and then the Venables-Llewelyn family.

Since the 1960s it has housed the Llysdinam Field Centre, run in association with Cardiff University, which has made it one of the longest-running freshwater and upland ecology research stations in Wales.

That matters more than it sounds. Long-run data sets on Welsh river chemistry, invertebrates and acidification — including the work that established what conifer plantations were doing to upland streams — came substantially out of this district, and the records go back further than almost anywhere comparable.

The gardens open occasionally under the National Garden Scheme.

The village

Stone houses along the road, a church of 1883, a pub, and a good deal of through traffic on the A470 between Builth and Llandrindod.

The Wye Valley Walk passes through, and the river here is broad, shallow and heavily used by canoeists in summer.

Around

Llandrindod Wells is five miles north-east and Builth Wells four miles south. Disserth church, two miles east, is one of the least altered churches in Wales: box pews, a three-decker pulpit, and almost nothing done to it since the eighteenth century, because the parish was too poor to restore it and the village had moved away.

It is a genuinely remarkable survival and hardly anybody goes.