Y Dolydd, Llanfyllin

On the hill above Llanfyllin stands a large stone building of 1838 that most people driving past would take for a country house or an institution of some unspecified kind.

It is the Llanfyllin union workhouse, and it is the most complete surviving example in Wales.

Read the plan, not the front

The frontage is almost dignified. That is deliberate and it is misleading.

Behind it the plan radiates: a central block where the master and matron lived, with sightlines down each wing, and wings dividing the inmates into categories — men from women, adults from children, the able-bodied from the infirm — with walled exercise yards between them and a single controlled entrance.

The separation was the policy. Families entering the workhouse were split at the door: husbands from wives, and children over a certain age from their mothers. That was not incidental harshness. It was the mechanism by which the workhouse was made a genuine last resort, under the principle of less eligibility — conditions inside had to be worse than the worst available outside.

Walk the yards. The yards are what the building is actually for.

What it was like in practice

Rural Welsh unions used the workhouse less than the 1834 Act intended and used outdoor relief — money and goods to people in their own homes — a great deal more, because in a scattered upland district it was cheaper and because the guardians were local farmers and tradesmen who knew the families.

Y Dolydd was rarely full. It held the old without families, the chronically sick, unmarried mothers, orphans, people with mental illness or learning disabilities, and vagrants passing through, who were kept in a separate casual ward and expected to work for a night's lodging.

That does not soften the system. It means the threat did the work and the building only had to exist.

Afterwards

It closed as a workhouse in 1930 when the unions were abolished, became a hospital, then a farm, and then fell into decline.

A trust has been restoring it since 2004, with volunteer labour and periodic public opening. It has also been used for events and as a music venue, which is an unusual afterlife for such a building and one that its trustees have thought about carefully.

The records

The Llanfyllin union's records are at Powys Archives in Llandrindod Wells: guardians' minute books, admission and discharge registers, and settlement examinations in which paupers had to account for their whole working lives to establish which parish was liable for them.

They name people who appear in no other record. Very little is digitised and very few people look.

Visiting

Opening is limited and event-based. Check before travelling.

Llanfyllin is a mile down the hill, with its brick church of 1706 and its borough charter of 1293.