Wye, Ithon and the Wells

The Ithon joins the Wye a little above Builth, and the ground between them is gentler than anything around it. That combination of accessible country and mineral springs produced the strangest settlement history in Powys.

Llandrindod Wells barely existed before the 1860s. The railway arrived, the water was marketed, and a complete Victorian resort was laid out on open ground. It is now the county town of Powys, which means the administrative centre of the county is its newest town.

Builth is the older place, at a Wye crossing that has mattered since the Normans built a castle to hold it.

What to look for

Spa architecture. Pump rooms, pavilions, long hotel terraces and boarding houses built to a scale that assumed the visitors would keep coming. They stopped after 1914.

Castell Collen, the Roman fort above the Ithon at Llanyre, occupied on and off for around three centuries.

Cilmeri, west of Builth, where Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was killed in December 1282, marked by a granite monolith set up in 1956.

The Royal Welsh showground at Llanelwedd, permanent since 1963 and the largest agricultural event in Europe for one week a year.