Presteigne

Presteigne became the county town of Radnorshire because somebody was killed at Rhayader.

The details are murky and the sources disagree, which is worth saying rather than smoothing over. A nineteenth-century gazetteer records that a sheriff was resisted in the execution of his duty and killed in a tumult at Rhayader. Other accounts make the victim a judge presiding at the Court of Great Sessions. What is clear is the consequence. A statute of 35 and 36 Henry VIII moved the county courts, which had been sitting alternately at New Radnor and Rhayader, to New Radnor and Presteigne instead. Before long the assizes were held at Presteigne and nowhere else. New Radnor kept the title on paper. Presteigne got the business, and held it for four hundred years.

Why here

The town sits on the Lugg, and the Lugg here is the border. Cross the three-arched bridge and you are in Herefordshire. The parish itself straddled the line, with part of it in the hundred of Wigmore, which made for administrative confusion and a great deal of trade.

Radnorshire was assembled in 1536 out of the old lordships of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren, the country between Wye and Severn, and it never had an obvious middle. Radnor Forest sits in the centre like a plug. Every candidate for county town was on an edge. Presteigne was on the most useful edge, standing on the coaching route from London and Gloucester towards Aberystwyth, malting the barley grown around it, and doing well out of both.

The buildings of a county

The county gaol went up in 1820. The Shire Hall followed in 1829, a proper piece of Georgian courtroom architecture, and it survives complete enough to operate now as the Judge's Lodging, still gas-lit, one of the better small museums in Wales.

By the 1830s the town had a shire hall, a gaol, a town hall, a grammar school and around 1,500 people in the township. Samuel Lewis called it the chief town in the county.

The unravelling

It took a century. When Radnorshire County Council was created in 1889 it met at Presteigne, but Llandrindod Wells was growing fast on the back of its spa water and its railway station, and it sat much nearer the middle of the county. Administration went there. When Powys was formed in 1974 Llandrindod became the county town, and Presteigne was left holding the buildings without the function. The assizes themselves were abolished nationally in 1971. The judges stopped coming.

A railway did reach the town. The Lugg Valley line was authorised in 1865, ten and three quarter miles of it, running east to join the Central Wales line at Llangunllo. It was never going to make money and it did not.

What is there now

A town whose scale is wrong for its size, in the best way. The main streets are wider and better built than a place of this population has any business being, because they were built for a county rather than for a market.

St Andrew's church, which gives Llanandras its Welsh name, holds a Flemish tapestry. It is usually dated to about 1510. The Radnorshire Arms is dated 1616. Above the town is a wooded mound still called the Warden, the site of a castle that is now essentially a park.

Presteigne runs an internationally regarded classical music festival every August, which is the sort of thing that happens when a small town has a large church, good acoustics and a long memory of being important.