Talybont-on-Usk

Talybont is a small village that happens to sit at the junction of everything.

The Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal runs through it on an embankment with a wharf. The Brinore Tramroad climbs south from that wharf up onto the hill. Above the village is the Talybont reservoir, and the old railway that served its construction is now a path.

Within a mile you can walk a canal of 1800, a horse-drawn tramroad of 1815 and a railway alignment of the 1930s, all built for different reasons and all now used by people on foot and bicycles.

The canal

The Brecknock and Abergavenny reached here around 1800, built to carry lime and coal rather than anything else. There is an aqueduct, a lift bridge, and a wharf with buildings round it.

Lime is the underrated story. Burning limestone and spreading it on acid upland pasture is what made a great deal of marginal Welsh land farmable, and the kilns beside the canal here are where it was done at scale.

The Brinore Tramroad

Opened in 1815, running roughly eight miles from Talybont wharf up over the hill to the limestone quarries and coal levels at Trefil.

Horse-drawn, on stone sleeper blocks, with the loaded wagons running down and the horses hauling the empties back up. Stone blocks with the iron fixing holes still in them survive along the route in quantity.

Tramroads like this fed the ironworks of the south Wales valleys and the fields of Powys from the same quarries, and they are among the earliest railways anywhere in the world in any meaningful sense.

The reservoir

Built in the 1930s to supply Newport, a mile and a half long in the Caerfanell valley above the village.

It is now also a hydroelectric site, and the community has a stake in local renewable generation, which for a village of this size is unusual and has been going for some years.

The reservoir is a good place for wintering wildfowl and there is a hide.

Now

The Taff Trail passes through, which brings a steady flow of cyclists between Brecon and Cardiff. There are two pubs, a shop and a village hall that punches well above its weight.

Above the village the Brecon Beacons proper begin, and the walk up onto Waun Rydd and the Neuadd horseshoe from here is one of the better routes onto the range from the northern side.