The Drowned Valleys

Two English cities needed water. Both looked west, both found valleys in Powys with plenty of rain, hard rock and hardly any voters, and both got what they wanted with very little fuss.

That is the short version and it is more or less accurate.

Llanwddyn

Liverpool's population had roughly quadrupled in fifty years and its water was inadequate and periodically lethal. In 1880 the corporation obtained the Act it needed for the Vyrnwy valley in Montgomeryshire.

The village of Llanwddyn was in the way. Around thirty-seven houses, two chapels, a church, three inns and a school. Somewhere between 400 and 500 people lived in the parish, and the usual figure given for those directly displaced is around 200.

The dam was the first large masonry dam in Britain, finished in 1888, and it is genuinely impressive engineering. The straining tower looks like a small Rhineland castle standing in the lake, which was deliberate.

A new Llanwddyn was built below the dam. The old churchyard was cleared and the remains reinterred. Water reaches Liverpool by gravity along an aqueduct of about 68 miles.

Elan

Birmingham followed twelve years later. The Elan and Claerwen valleys west of Rhayader were higher, wetter and even emptier, and the Birmingham Corporation Water Act of 1892 authorised a scheme far larger than Liverpool's.

Four dams went up between 1893 and 1904 and Edward VII opened them. Claerwen was added in 1952. The aqueduct to Birmingham runs 73 miles, entirely by gravity, and still does.

Under the water: farms, a school, a chapel, and two country houses, Cwm Elan and Nantgwyllt. Percy Bysshe Shelley had stayed at Cwm Elan in 1811 and tried unsuccessfully to buy Nantgwyllt two years later, which is why the drowning of the Elan turns up in literary histories more often than the drowning of Llanwddyn does.

Around a hundred people were displaced. Landowners were compensated. Tenants and labourers largely were not, and several accounts record that they simply left the district. A purpose-built village housed the construction workers, who numbered in the thousands at peak, and then it emptied too.

Why there was no argument

Compare Tryweryn. In 1957 Liverpool obtained an Act to drown Capel Celyn in Meirionnydd, and it became the defining Welsh political grievance of the twentieth century: every Welsh MP but one opposed the bill, it passed anyway, and Cofiwch Dryweryn has been painted on walls ever since.

Vyrnwy and Elan were bigger schemes and produced almost nothing comparable. Three reasons are usually given, and all three seem right.

Timing. In the 1880s and 1890s there was no Welsh national political movement with the reach to run a campaign, and no Welsh Office, no Assembly and no national broadcaster to carry one.

Language and press. Capel Celyn was a Welsh-speaking community with a Welsh-language press that reported it as a national injury. Radnorshire by the 1890s had almost no Welsh; Llanwddyn had more, but Montgomeryshire's chapel press did not mobilise in the way the north-western papers did sixty years later.

And the law was simply on the cities' side. A private Act of Parliament settled the matter, compensation was a question of property rather than of community, and there was no legal category for what a village loses when it is dispersed.

What it left

The reservoirs are now the most visited landscapes in mid Wales, managed by Welsh Water for access and conservation as much as for supply. The Elan estate runs to around 45,000 acres and is open in a way very little Welsh upland is.

Llyn Clywedog above Llanidloes, built in the 1960s, belongs to a different category. It regulates the flow of the Severn rather than exporting water, and it drowned far less. That distinction matters locally more than it does anywhere else.

Both the big schemes are still working. Water leaves Powys every day for cities that have no particular reason to know where it comes from, which is the part that still rankles, considerably more than the dams themselves.