Talgarth

Talgarth is described almost everywhere as the seat of the kings of Brycheiniog. It is a good story and it may even be true. It is not, however, what the evidence shows, and the gap between the two is the most interesting thing about the place.

The tradition runs like this. Brycheiniog was founded in the fifth century by Brychan, a prince of part-Irish descent, and its administrative focus stood at Talgarth in the Llynfi valley. The kingdom took his name, and so did the county of Brecknockshire, which inherited roughly the same ground and lasted until 1974. The name Talgarth itself is read as the brow or end of the ridge, or the front of the enclosure, from tal and garth. The town does sit exactly where the lowland stops and the Black Mountains begin.

The archaeology tells a different story, and a better one.

The island

In 1867 a crannog, an artificial island, was identified in Llangorse Lake five miles to the south-west. Two local antiquaries, Edgar and Henry Dumbleton, dug it in 1869 and published what they found. Then it was largely ignored for a century, partly because nobody believed Wales had crannogs. It turns out Wales has exactly one.

Tree-ring dating of the submerged oak palisade planks, carried out in 1988, dated the felling to between AD 889 and 893. A joint Cardiff University and National Museum Wales excavation ran from 1989 to 1994, with further work in 2004.

What came up was a royal household. Over 40,000 fragments of animal bone. Fine metalwork, secular and religious. An embroidered textile, preserved in waterlogged mud, of a quality with no parallel in Wales. The island was built of brushwood and sandstone boulders, ringed by several lines of oak plank palisade, by people who knew what they were doing and had most likely learned it in Ireland — which fits the dynasty's own claimed origins rather neatly.

The Llandaff charters name kings of Brycheiniog and describe an estate of some 400 hectares around the lake. The crannog is now generally accepted as the residence of Tewdwr ab Elise, king of Brycheiniog around the turn of the tenth century, built when it was, most probably, because Viking raiders had reached the kingdom in 896 and an island was safer than a hall.

It did not work. In 916 a Mercian army under Æthelflæd came to a place the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls Brecenanmere, burned it, and took away the king's wife and thirty-three other people.

So Talgarth's claim is traditional, attached to a legendary founder. The hard evidence for a royal centre of Brycheiniog sits under the water at Llangorse. Both belong in the story of this valley. Only one of them can be dated.

After the Normans

Power moved firmly to Brecon and never came back. Talgarth settled into being a market town at the foot of the mountains. Bronllys Castle, with its round keep of the early thirteenth century, stands a mile and a half away. In Talgarth itself a defensible stone tower sits beside the bridge over the Ennig. It is generally given a fourteenth-century date.

The parish church is dedicated to St Gwendoline, counted by tradition among Brychan's many children — which is either evidence of an early religious centre or evidence of a very productive legend.

Howell Harris

The eighteenth century gave Talgarth its second national moment. Howell Harris, born at Trefeca just outside the town in 1714, had the experience at Talgarth parish church in 1735 that set him preaching, and the Welsh Methodist revival followed. He built a religious community at Trefeca in 1752 and is buried at the church where it started. For two or three decades this small town was one of the engines of Welsh nonconformity.

The hospital

The twentieth century brought something Powys heritage writing usually skips. The Brecon and Radnor Joint Counties Lunatic Asylum opened just outside Talgarth in 1903, later the Mid Wales Hospital, and for most of the century it was the largest employer for miles. It closed in 1999. The buildings are still there, decaying behind fences, and a great many local families have a connection to them. It is part of the town's history whether or not it is comfortable.

Talgarth Mill, on the Ennig, was restored by a community group and reopened in the early 2010s. It grinds flour and sells bread. Worth mentioning because it is the one thing on this list that is a beginning rather than an ending.