Talgarth Tower

In the middle of Talgarth, beside the bridge over the Ennig, stands a square stone tower of three storeys with very small windows and thick walls.

It is not a castle. It is a defensible town building — somewhere with a door that could be barred and a floor above ground level, in a market town on a border that saw raiding into the fifteenth century.

It is generally given a fourteenth-century date.

Why it exists

Towns in this part of Wales were burned repeatedly. Hay in 1401, and most of the boroughs of Powys at some point during the Glyndŵr revolt.

A merchant or a burgess with goods and money had a straightforward problem: the town might be attacked, the castle was for the lord and his garrison, and there was nowhere else to go.

The answer, across the Marches and in Ireland and the Scottish borders in comparable conditions, was a small strong building — a tower house or a defensible undercroft — where a household and its valuables could sit out a raid.

Very few survive in Wales. This is one of the clearest.

What to look for

The wall thickness, visible at the openings. The lack of ground-floor windows. The original entrance arrangement, altered but readable. A vaulted or beamed ground floor used for storage, with the living space above.

Compare it with Bronllys Castle a mile and a half away, which is a lord's round keep on a Norman motte and belongs to a completely different order of building. Talgarth Tower is the private, commercial, small-scale version of the same anxiety.

Now

It has been used as a shop, a tourist information point and a community space at various times, which is a reasonable fate for a building of this kind and better than most.

Around

Talgarth's parish church, where Howell Harris was converted in 1735 and where he is buried, is a short walk away. Trefeca, where he founded his religious community in 1752, is a mile out of the town.

Talgarth Mill on the Ennig was restored by a community group and grinds flour. Bronllys Castle is a mile and a half north-west and Castell Dinas, the highest castle site in England or Wales, three miles south.