Welshpool

The Welsh name is the honest one. Y Trallwng means the marshy hollow, and the town sits on flat wet ground where the Severn valley widens out towards Shropshire.

The English name was Pool until the nineteenth century, when Welsh was added in front of it to stop the Post Office confusing it with Poole in Dorset. That is the whole story of the name and it says a good deal about which direction the town has always faced.

The castle

Powis Castle is the reason Welshpool is not simply another market town. It stands on a ridge above the town in red sandstone, and unlike almost every other castle in Wales it has never been abandoned.

It was built by the princes of Powys Wenwynwyn, the southern half of the old kingdom, in the thirteenth century. Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn came to terms with the English crown rather than with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, which cost him a great deal of Welsh sympathy and saved his castle. His descendants held it, the Herberts held it after them, and the Earls of Powis hold the title now. It passed to the National Trust in 1952 with the family still in part of it.

The terraced gardens, cut into the ridge in the late seventeenth century, are the best surviving formal terraces of their kind in Britain. The interior holds the Clive Collection, which arrived by marriage when Edward Clive, son of Robert Clive, married a Herbert heiress. It is one of the largest holdings of South Asian material in Britain outside a national museum, and the National Trust's own interpretation now addresses fairly directly how it was acquired.

The canal

The Montgomery Canal reached Welshpool in the 1790s and gave the town a proper transport link for the first time. It carried lime, coal and timber, and the wharf buildings by the water are the tidiest surviving canal architecture in the county.

The canal was breached in 1936 and never commercially recovered. Restoration has been running in sections for decades and much of the Welshpool length is navigable again.

The little railway

The Welshpool and Llanfair Light Railway opened in 1903, two feet six inches between the rails, built to get sheep and goods down from Llanfair Caereinion. It ran through the streets of Welshpool itself. Passenger services stopped in 1931, freight in 1956, and volunteers reopened it as a preserved line from 1963.

It is genuinely unusual as narrow-gauge lines go: built for agriculture rather than slate, and steeply graded because the country gave it no choice.

The market

Welshpool has held a livestock market since the middle ages and still holds one. The modern sheep market on the edge of town is regularly described as the largest in Europe. On sale days the town fills with lorries and the agricultural economy of half of mid Wales is visible in one field.

What is there now

The castle and its gardens, which take half a day. The canal wharf. The narrow-gauge station.

And, tucked behind the main street, the cockpit: a small circular brick building where cockfighting took place until it was banned in 1849. It is one of very few surviving in Britain on its original site, and it is a useful corrective to any impression that market-town history is entirely wool and lime.