Sites and structures
Castles, churches, monastic remains, prehistoric monuments and industrial sites, each with its designation and record number where one exists.
Castles
Motte-and-bailey earthworks, stone keeps and the fortified houses that replaced them.
Site · castle
Montgomery Castle
Built in 1223 on a rock spur, host to the treaty that recognised a Prince of Wales in 1267, and pulled down on parliamentary orders in 1649.
Site · castle and manor house
Tretower Court and Castle
A Norman round keep and a late medieval manor house standing in the same field, ninety seconds apart. Nowhere in Wales shows the change more plainly.
Site · castle
Dolforwyn Castle
The only castle Llywelyn ap Gruffudd built from scratch, raised in 1273 in direct defiance of the English crown and lost four years later.
Site · castle earthworks
Builth Castle
Edward I spent a fortune here between 1277 and 1282 and not one stone of it is left. What survives is the best set of castle earthworks in Powys.
Site · castle
Bronllys Castle
A circular stone keep on a Norman motte, complete to three storeys, and one of the best-preserved round keeps in the Marches.
Site · castle and house
Hay Castle
A Norman gateway, a Jacobean mansion built into it, two catastrophic fires, forty years of dereliction, and a restoration finished in 2022.
Site · hillfort and castle
Castell Dinas
The highest castle site in England or Wales, at around 450 metres, built inside an Iron Age hillfort that was already ancient when the Normans arrived.
Site · earthwork
Mathrafal
Medieval Welsh tradition names this the royal seat of Powys, alongside Aberffraw and Dinefwr. What is in the ground is a Norman ringwork.
Site · defensible tower
Talgarth Tower
A stone tower standing beside the bridge in the middle of a market town, built when a merchant needed somewhere to retreat to and not much else survives of that idea in Wales.
Monastic remains
Cistercian abbeys and the early church sites that predate the parish system.
Site · Cistercian abbey
Abbey Cwmhir
The Cistercians laid out a nave longer than any other in Wales and never finished it. Llywelyn ap Gruffudd is said to be buried in what they did build.
Site · Cistercian abbey
Strata Marcella
The largest Cistercian church in Wales stood in a field near Welshpool. There is nothing left of it above ground at all.
Churches
Parish churches, their fabric, their fittings and what they were built out of.
Site · church and shrine
Pennant Melangell
At the head of a dead-end valley in the Berwyn stands the earliest surviving Romanesque shrine in northern Europe, reassembled from stones taken out of the church walls.
Site · parish church
St Stephen's, Old Radnor
The oldest organ case in Britain, a fifteenth-century screen, and a font that may be a prehistoric boulder. Probably the finest parish church in Powys.
Site · rood screen
The Llananno Screen
A tiny church beside the Ithon holding what is generally reckoned the finest medieval rood screen in Wales. The church around it was rebuilt; the screen was kept.
Site · parish church
Disserth Church
Box pews with families' names painted on them, a three-decker pulpit, and almost nothing done to the building since the eighteenth century, because the parish was too poor to restore it.
Site · rood screen
The Llanwnnog Screen
The third of the great mid-Wales screens, in a church near Caersws, with a poet buried in the churchyard outside.
Site · priory church and cathedral
Brecon Cathedral
A Benedictine priory founded in the 1090s that became a cathedral in 1923, nine hundred years later. It still feels like a large priory church, because that is exactly what it is.
Prehistoric and early medieval
Hillforts, chambered tombs, standing stones and the royal crannog.
Site · early medieval royal residence
Llangorse Crannog
The only crannog in Wales, built for a king of Brycheiniog in the 890s, burned by a Mercian army in 916. The timbers are dated to within four years.
Site · Iron Age hillfort
Pen y Crug
Four ramparts on a hill above Brecon, an hour's walk from the town centre, and the clearest hillfort earthworks in Powys for the effort involved.
Site · hillfort
The Breiddin
A hillfort occupied from the late Bronze Age, standing over the Severn plain, and quarried away on one side while it was being excavated on the other.
Site · hillfort
Craig Rhiwarth
One of the largest hillforts in Montgomeryshire, on a crag above Llangynog, with the remains of dozens of round houses inside it and lead mines cut into the slope below.
Site · Neolithic burial monuments
The Black Mountains Chambered Tombs
A tight group of Neolithic burial monuments round Talgarth and Crickhowell, one of them with medieval graffiti cut into its stones by people who already thought it was ancient.
Site · standing stones
Maen Llia and the Fforest Fawr Stones
A slab over three metres high standing alone in an empty pass, and a scatter of Bronze Age monuments across the moor around it.
Roman
Auxiliary forts and the roads that linked them.
Site · Roman auxiliary fort
Y Gaer, Brecon
A cavalry fort of about AD 75, excavated by Mortimer Wheeler in the 1920s, and the best upstanding Roman masonry in Powys.
Site · Roman auxiliary fort
Castell Collen
A Roman fort above the Ithon that was made smaller partway through its life, and the reduction is still visible in the earthworks.
Industrial
Mines, quarries, kilns, tramroads and mills.
Site · lead mine
The Van Mine
Ore was struck here in 1865. For about a decade the Van was one of the most profitable lead mines in Britain, with its own railway. By the 1890s it was finished.
Site · reservoirs
The Elan Valley Dams
Six dams, 73 miles of aqueduct, and water that has run to Birmingham by gravity alone since 1904.
Site · dam and reservoir
The Vyrnwy Dam
The first large masonry dam built in Britain, finished in 1888, and a straining tower designed to look like a castle on a Bavarian lake.
Site · quarry and limeworks
Llanymynech Limeworks
One of very few surviving Hoffmann continuous kilns in Britain, at the foot of a hill that has been worked for copper since the Romans and for limestone since the eighteenth century.
Site · lead mine
The Dylife Workings
Leats cut for miles along open hillside to drive one of the largest waterwheels in Wales, on a moor that supported several hundred people and now supports almost none.
Site · horse tramroad
The Brinore Tramroad
Eight miles of horse-drawn railway opened in 1815, running from a canal wharf at Talybont up over the hill to the limestone quarries and coal levels at Trefil.
Houses and estates
Great houses, their gardens and the estates that built them.
Site · house and garden
Powis Castle
The only castle in Wales that was never abandoned. Its princes chose the English crown over Llywelyn, and it is still standing because of it.
Site · upland farm and reserve
Gilfach
A Radnorshire hill farm preserved whole — medieval longhouse, hay meadow, ffridd and open hill — rather than as fragments. The best place in Powys to see how upland farming actually worked.
Site · Shire Hall and museum
The Judge's Lodging
A Georgian county courtroom with the judge's apartments above and the servants' quarters below, preserved complete and lit by gas.
Site · union workhouse
Y Dolydd, Llanfyllin
The most complete surviving workhouse building in Wales, and the clearest place in the country to see what the 1834 Poor Law was actually designed to do.
Site · monument
Cilmeri
A rough granite monolith beside the road west of Builth, marking where the last native Prince of Wales was killed on 11 December 1282.
Site · market hall
Llanidloes Market Hall
The last half-timbered market hall left in Wales, standing on open oak arches at the crossroads so that trading could carry on underneath.