Rhayader

The town is named after a waterfall that is no longer there.

Rhaeadr Gwy is the waterfall on the Wye, and there was one, immediately below where the bridge now stands. When the bridge was built in 1780 the rock was blasted to make room for it and the fall went with it. The town kept the name.

That is a small thing but it sets a pattern. Rhayader's history is largely about water and about other people's decisions concerning it.

The crossroads

Four roads meet here and the Wye is crossable. That is the whole reason for the town, and it has been enough. Drovers came through with cattle heading east. The Cistercians at Strata Florida held land in the hills to the west. The Normans built a castle on the mound above the river; almost nothing of it survives.

Rhayader had a weekly market, several fairs, and by the eighteenth century a reputation among travellers for being remote, which it was.

Rebecca

In the winter of 1843 and into 1844, tollgates around Rhayader were attacked and destroyed, repeatedly, by men in women's clothing and blackened faces.

The Rebecca Riots are usually associated with Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, where they started in 1839. What is less often said is that the movement reached its most sustained level here, in Radnorshire, after it had subsided further south. Rhayader is often described as having had more tollgates destroyed than anywhere else.

The grievance was real. Turnpike trusts had put gates on short stretches of road so that a farmer taking lime from a kiln to a field a few miles away could pay several tolls each way. In a district this poor, on land this thin, that was the difference between viability and not.

Elan

In 1892 Birmingham Corporation obtained the Act it needed and began building dams in the Elan and Claerwen valleys, twelve miles of them, west of the town. Four reservoirs were completed between 1893 and 1904 and opened by Edward VII.

The valley had people in it. Farms, two country houses at Cwm Elan and Nantgwyllt, a school and a chapel went under the water. Around a hundred people were displaced.

Only landowners were compensated properly. There was no equivalent of the public argument that Tryweryn provoked sixty years later, partly because Radnorshire in the 1890s had almost no political weight and partly because the Welsh-language press that drove the Tryweryn campaign had little readership here.

Rhayader gained from the construction: several thousand workers lived in a purpose-built village at Elan, and the town supplied them. Then they left.

What is there now

A small town with a disproportionate number of pubs, a clock tower of 1924, and the Wye running through it.

The Elan estate is open, and Welsh Water has managed it as much for public access and conservation as for water supply for some decades now. The dams are Victorian engineering on a scale that still surprises people who come round the corner and see the first one.

Red kites are the other thing. The species survived its near-extinction in Britain in exactly this country, a handful of pairs in the Wye and Elan valleys, and the feeding station at Gigrin Farm brings several hundred birds in daily. It is one of the genuine conservation successes of the last century and it happened here because here is where the last of them held on.