Themes
Subjects that run across the whole county: language, landownership, water, work, movement, and the things that were removed.
Theme · clearance
Mynydd Epynt, 1940
In 1940 the War Office cleared fifty-four farms off Epynt. Around two hundred people left, and the western edge of Welsh-speaking Breconshire went with them.
Theme · water
The Drowned Valleys
Liverpool took Llanwddyn. Birmingham took the Elan. Both were finished decades before anyone in Wales was in a position to argue about it.
Theme · religion
Chapels and Nonconformity
The largest building in most Powys villages is a chapel, and increasingly it is somebody's house. This is the institution that taught rural Wales to read.
Theme · movement
The Drovers
For six centuries the main export of mid Wales walked to England on its own feet, and the roads it used are still the clearest tracks on the hill.
Theme · language
The Welsh Language in Powys
Radnorshire lost Welsh almost completely, and did so early. Ystradgynlais never did. Understanding the difference explains a great deal about this county.
Theme · the March
The Border
Not a line but a zone, roughly ten miles wide, that has been moving for thirteen hundred years and has not finished.
Theme · work
Wool and Flannel
For about eighty years mid Wales clothed a good part of the industrial world, and then Yorkshire took the trade and the towns never fully recovered.
Theme · language
Reading Place Names
Radnorshire lost the Welsh language almost entirely and kept nearly all its Welsh place names. The map remembers what the population forgot.
Theme · the military estate
The Army in Powys
The Ministry of Defence is one of the largest landholders in the county. Most people who write about Powys heritage act as though it is not there.
Theme · absence
Silences in the Landscape
The ruins on the open hill are not medieval. They are Victorian and Edwardian, and they are the clearest record this county has of the people who left.
Theme · land
Estates and Landownership
In 1873 a government survey found that a handful of families owned most of Powys. Fifty years later almost all of it had been sold, in the largest transfer of land since the dissolution.
Theme · work
Metal and Stone
Lead, silver, slate and limestone. Powys had a metal-mining industry that made fortunes for people who lived somewhere else and left holes on the hill.
Theme · land and work
Farming the Hill
Almost everything visible in Powys is the result of somebody grazing sheep on ground that would rather be growing trees.
Theme · movement
Routes and Movement
Powys is a place people cross. Almost every town here exists because two ways met, and the ones that lost their route lost everything else with it.
Theme · the county itself
How Powys Was Assembled
Powys is fifty years old and the name is thirteen hundred. The two refer to almost completely different pieces of ground.
Theme · building
Buildings Made from What Was There
Old red sandstone in the south, grey Silurian in the middle, timber frame along the border. You can tell where you are in Powys from a wall.
Theme · settlement
The Shape of a Powys Town
Planted or grown. Every town in this county is one or the other, and the street plan tells you which within about thirty seconds.
Theme · settlement
Where People Live Now
The county's population is roughly what it was in 1900, and almost none of the same people are in the same places.
Theme · tradition
Folklore, and What to Do With It
Powys has drowned cities, a lake that swallowed a palace, and a grave where grass will not grow. None of it is evidence, and all of it is worth recording.
Theme · water and money
The Four Wells
Four towns in one county added Wells to their names and sold their water. One of them was built from nothing to do it, and is now the county town.
Theme · transport
What Was Built and What Was Taken Away
Powys got a dense railway network in twenty years and lost most of it in ten. A town of eight thousand people has had no station since 1962.
Theme · the earthwork
Offa's Dyke
Eighty miles of bank and ditch, the largest thing built in Britain between the Romans and the Normans, and nobody is certain what it was for.
Theme · the revolt
Glyndŵr in Powys
He held a parliament at Machynlleth and burned most of the towns in this county. Then he vanished, and there is no record of his death, burial or capture.
Theme · land use
The Plantations
Conifers cover a substantial part of upland Powys and almost none of it is older than a century. Underneath the trees is a landscape nobody has ploughed since.
Theme · welfare and its absence
The Workhouse
Every district in Powys had a union workhouse. The buildings survive in numbers, the records survive almost completely, and hardly anyone reads them.
Theme · work
The Trades That Held a Parish Together
A Powys parish in 1880 supported a blacksmith, a wheelwright, a saddler, a miller, a shoemaker and a tailor. By 1950 it supported none of them.
Theme · sources
Reading a Churchyard
A Powys burial ground records language shift, emigration, infant mortality and occupation more precisely than almost any written source, and it is free to read.
Theme · culture
Singing
Plygain survived continuously in the Tanat and Vyrnwy valleys when it died out everywhere else. It is still sung, in parts, before dawn, by whoever stands up.
Theme · trade
Market Day
A charter, a wide street and a set of fair dates. That combination created most of the towns in this county and it is still running one week a year at Llanelwedd.
Theme · land use
Trees That Were Worked
Ancient woodland in Powys is not wild. Almost every wood in the county was a crop, cut on rotation, and the shapes it was cut into are still visible.
Theme · water and belief
Wells and Springs
Nearly every llan in Powys had a well attached to its saint, and a good many kept their curative reputation for three hundred years after the Reformation was supposed to have ended all that.
Theme · foundations
The Rock Underneath
Old red sandstone in the south, Silurian mudstone through the middle, limestone and coal in the far south-west. Almost everything else on this site follows from that.
Theme · the present tense
What Is Being Lost Now
Heritage writing is usually about the past. The chapels, field barns and farm buildings of Powys are disappearing at a rate that will make this decade a hard one to reconstruct.
Theme · the county on the page
Writing Powys
Giraldus in 1188, Kilvert in the 1870s, Chatwin in 1982. The outsiders write about the border; the insiders write about the chapel and the hill.