Gilfach

Most heritage sites give you one thing: a house, or a monument, or a habitat. Gilfach gives you a whole working holding, in one piece, and that is unusual enough to be worth a detour.

The Radnorshire Wildlife Trust bought the farm in 1988 in the Marteg valley near St Harmon, and has managed it since as a nature reserve without dismantling what made it a farm.

The house

The farmhouse is a longhouse of medieval origin — house and byre under one roof with a cross-passage between them — subsequently altered but with the original arrangement legible.

That is the characteristic building of upland Wales and it is described on the vernacular buildings page. Seeing one in its own farmyard, on its own ground, with the fields it belonged to still round it, does more than any amount of reading.

The whole sequence

Walk from the river upwards and you pass through every zone of an upland Welsh farm in order.

The valley floor: the Marteg, with salmon, brook lamprey and dipper, and the flood meadow beside it.

The in-bye: enclosed fields near the house, the best ground, cut for hay. Gilfach's hay meadows are managed traditionally — cut late, no fertiliser — and hold the flora that used to be ordinary and is now rare.

The ffridd: the rough grazing between the enclosed land and the open mountain, part-improved, walled off. This is the most informative zone on any Welsh hill farm, and it is where the abandoned fields and the ruins usually are.

The open hill: unenclosed grazing above.

That gradient is the whole logic of upland farming, and almost nowhere else can you walk it in an hour with interpretation along the way.

What else is there

The Mid-Wales Railway ran through the valley and closed in 1962. Its alignment and a tunnel survive on the reserve.

Red kites overhead, which is unsurprising: this is precisely the country in which the species survived its near-extinction in Britain.

There are Bronze Age cairns on the hill above, and the remains of earlier settlement in the ffridd.

Visiting

Free, open all year, with parking. The farmhouse operates as a visitor centre with limited opening — check before travelling if you want to get inside it.

There is a nature trail and a longer walk onto the hill. The tracks are rough and the ground is wet.

St Harmon is a mile or so east and Rhayader four miles south, with the Elan Valley beyond.