Metal and Stone

Powys is not thought of as an industrial county and for most of its area that is right. But the uplands are cut about with workings that supported thousands of people, and two of them were, briefly, among the most productive in Britain.

Lead

The ore is galena, lead sulphide, and it runs in veins through the Silurian rocks of the central uplands. It usually carries a little silver, which is what made the difference between a marginal operation and a fortune.

Llangynog, at the head of the Tanat valley below Craig Rhiwarth, was worked from the seventeenth century and in the 1720s was among the richest lead mines in Britain. It made a great deal of money for the Powis estate, which owned it. Later the same valley head produced slate.

Dylife, high on the road between Llanidloes and Machynlleth, supported a settlement of several hundred people in the mid nineteenth century with a chapel, a school and, at one point, a police station. The Van Rheidol wheel there was among the largest waterwheels in Wales. Almost nothing is left but the spoil, the leats and the wheelpits, and the road runs through what is now essentially empty moorland.

The Van, north-east of Llanidloes, was the spectacular one. Ore was struck in 1865 and for about a decade the mine was one of the most profitable lead producers in Britain, with its own railway down to Caersws. It employed several hundred men. By the 1890s it was effectively finished.

That pattern repeats: a strike, a boom of ten or fifteen years, a settlement thrown up around it, then cheap imported ore and exhaustion, and the people go.

What to look for on a mine site

Spoil tips, which are the obvious thing, and usually the least informative. Better are the leats: long contour channels cut across the hillside to bring water to the wheels, often traceable for miles and often still holding water.

Wheelpits, rectangular stone-lined slots. Engine house ruins. Dressing floors, which are flat terraced areas where ore was crushed and washed, usually near a stream. Buddle pits, circular settling basins.

And adits, which are horizontal entrances driven into the hillside. Do not go in. Mid Wales mine workings are unstable, frequently flooded and occasionally contain bad air, and several have killed people.

Limestone and lime

Less glamorous and far more important to more people.

Acid upland pasture needs lime, and burning limestone to make it was a universal rural activity anywhere the stone outcropped. Lime kilns are all over the county: stone-built, roughly conical or square, with a draw arch at the base, usually cut into a bank so the kiln could be charged from above.

The Llangattock escarpment above Crickhowell, and the country round Llanymynech on the Shropshire border, were quarried at industrial scale. The tramroads that took the stone away — the Brinore, the Llangattock, the Hay Railway — are among the earliest railways anywhere and were built to feed the ironworks of the south Wales valleys as well as the fields of Powys.

Both canals in the county, the Montgomery and the Brecknock and Abergavenny, were built primarily for lime and coal.

Slate

Not on the north Wales scale, but real. Llangynog and the Berwyn quarries, the Aberangell workings in the Dyfi valley with their tramway, and smaller operations across the west. Most Powys slate went into Powys roofs.

Iron and coal

The county's genuine heavy industry is in the far south-west, in the upper Swansea Valley, and it is dealt with at Ystradgynlais. Ynyscedwyn ironworks was where iron was first successfully smelted with anthracite in 1837, a process that transferred to Pennsylvania and helped industrialise the United States.

North Powys had earlier charcoal ironworking on a small scale, and coal was worked around Llanymynech and in the far south, but the anthracite coalfield is the only part of the county that industrialised in the way south Wales did.

Access and safety

Most of these sites are on private land or open access land with hazards. Shafts are often uncapped and hidden in vegetation. Spoil from lead workings is genuinely toxic and should not be handled or taken away, and dogs should be kept off it.

Scheduled monument status applies to several. Metal detecting or digging on them is a criminal offence.