Routes and Movement

There is no natural centre to Powys. The county is a set of valleys running out in every direction from a high wet middle that nobody has ever lived in, and every settlement of consequence sits where two ways met or where a river could be crossed.

Change the routes and you change everything. This county has had its routes changed four times.

Fords and passes

The oldest layer. Rhyd Whyman on the Severn gave Montgomery its reason to exist. Builth, Glasbury, Erwood, Newbridge and Hay are all Wye crossings. Machynlleth sits where several valleys converge at the tidal limit of the Dyfi.

The passes matter as much: the Gospel Pass over the Black Mountains, the Abergwesyn road west from Llanwrtyd, the Bwlch between the Usk valley and Llangorse. Any road over a Powys watershed is following something considerably older than itself.

Roman

The first engineered layer, and it was military. Forts a day's march apart at Y Gaer, Castell Collen, Caersws and Forden Gaer, linked north to south so troops could move between Chester and Caerleon without going round the coast.

The route generally called Sarn Helen runs through the western part of the county and stretches of it are walkable and obviously constructed.

Droving

For six centuries the principal traffic was cattle walking east. Drove roads deliberately avoided towns and later turnpikes because both charged tolls, so they kept to the high ground where the going was dry, the grazing free and nobody could stop them.

That is why they survive so well. A drove road on open hill is a broad green way forty or fifty yards wide with no ditches and no metalling.

Turnpikes and canals

From the 1750s turnpike trusts took over the main roads and built the bridges, milestones and toll houses that are still there. They also created the grievance that produced the Rebecca Riots in the 1840s, when a farmer moving lime a few miles could pay tolls several times each way.

The canals came for lime and coal. The Montgomery reached Welshpool in the 1790s and Newtown in 1819; the Brecknock and Abergavenny reached Brecon around 1800. Feeding both were tramroads — the Brinore, the Llangattock, the Hay — which are among the earliest railways anywhere in the world.

Rail, and its removal

The Cambrian, the Mid-Wales and the Central Wales lines opened through the county in the 1860s and remade it inside a decade. Llandrindod Wells was built from nothing to receive visitors the trains delivered. Newtown's mail order trade existed because parcels could travel. The drove trade died almost immediately, because cattle arriving by train arrived heavier rather than lighter.

Then most of it was taken away again. The Mid-Wales line and the Brecon and Merthyr both closed in 1962. Brecon, a town of eight thousand, has had no station since. The Van, Kerry and Lugg Valley branches went earlier.

What survives is the Cambrian along the Severn and the Heart of Wales line running Shrewsbury to Swansea, four trains a day, through country with nothing like the population to justify it.

What that leaves

A county where the car is not optional and public transport outside the two surviving lines is thin. Powys is now crossed east to west by people going somewhere else, on the A470, the A44 and the A483, and the towns that lost their junction have generally not replaced it.

What to look for

Milestones and toll houses on the old turnpikes, the latter usually single-storey with a canted front so the keeper could see both ways.

Sunken lanes on the approach to any ford, worn metres deep.

Green ways on the watershed, and groups of Scots pine that mark where the drovers stopped.

Railway alignments, which in Powys are usually the flattest and straightest thing in a valley: embankments, cuttings, bridge abutments and station houses now in gardens.