St Harmon

St Harmon is a scattered upland parish north of Rhayader with a church, a few farms and not much else, which is roughly what it was when Francis Kilvert arrived as vicar in 1876.

He stayed a year and a half before moving on to Bredwardine, and the diary entries from this parish are among the bleaker ones. The church had been rebuilt in a plain and cheap style earlier in the century, the congregation was small, and the parish had been losing people for a generation.

He records, memorably, being told by an old parishioner about the ancient font that had been thrown out during the rebuilding and was being used as a pig trough. He retrieved it.

That detail is worth more than it looks. The nineteenth-century restoration of Welsh churches destroyed a great deal, and the things that survived often did so because one person noticed.

The parish

Dispersed farms across high ground between the Wye and the Marteg, with the Elan country to the west and Abbeycwmhir over the hill to the east.

The name is from Garmon — Germanus — an early saint with several dedications in mid Wales, and there was an important early church here. The building that stands is largely nineteenth century.

Gilfach

A mile or so north-west, in the Marteg valley, is Gilfach: a traditional Radnorshire hill farm bought by the Radnorshire Wildlife Trust in 1988 and managed as a nature reserve.

It is unusual and worth going to. The farmhouse is a longhouse of medieval origin, and the reserve covers the whole range of upland habitat from the river through hay meadow and ffridd to open hill — the working landscape of a Radnorshire farm preserved as a unit rather than as fragments.

There are salmon and lamprey in the Marteg, red kites overhead, and a visitor centre in the farmhouse.

For anyone who has read the pages on this site about the ffridd, the hafod and the shape of upland farming, Gilfach is where you can see all of it at once in one holding.

Around

Rhayader is four miles south, and the Elan Valley beyond it. The road north over to Llangurig crosses empty country.