Silences in the Landscape

Walk up almost any Powys valley until the enclosed fields give out and you will pass a ruin. Four walls to gable height, a lintel, a rowan growing out of the hearth, and a set of stone-walled paddocks going back into the bracken.

People generally assume these are old. They are not. Most of them were occupied within the last century and a half, and their emptiness is the most important thing about this county that nothing on the ground announces.

The scale of it

Parish after parish across Powys lost a third or more of its population between the 1840s and 1914 and never recovered it. Some upland parishes lost more than half.

The reasons stack rather than compete.

Parliamentary enclosure took the common grazing, which is what made a smallholding with a handful of animals viable. Once the common went, the margin went.

The wool trade collapsed as manufacture moved to Yorkshire, taking with it the winter earnings that supplemented small farms.

Agricultural depression from the 1870s, driven by cheap grain and then cheap refrigerated meat from the Americas and Australasia, cut prices for two decades.

And there was somewhere to go. The south Wales coalfield was hiring, and so were Ohio, Pennsylvania and Patagonia. Llanbrynmair sent whole families to America. Chapel records across the county are full of farewell services.

What that looks like now

The ffridd, the rough grazing between the enclosed land and the open mountain, is where most of the evidence sits. Field walls running up into ground nobody now farms. Sheepfolds far above any current holding. Trackways to nowhere. Lines of hawthorn marking hedges that stopped being cut when the last tenant left.

Aerial survey and lidar have transformed what can be seen. Heneb's upland surveys record hundreds of platforms, longhouse foundations and enclosures across the Powys commons that are invisible at ground level under bracken.

The other silences

Depopulation is the big one but not the only one.

The drowned villages. Llanwddyn under Lake Vyrnwy from 1888, and the farms, school, chapel and two houses under the Elan reservoirs from 1904. Compensation went to landowners. Tenants mostly left the district.

Epynt. Fifty-four holdings and around two hundred people cleared in a single season in 1940 for a firing range that is still firing. The ruins are still there, behind the boundary.

The institutions. The Mid Wales Hospital at Talgarth opened in 1903 and closed in 1999, and at its height it was the largest employer for miles. Powys had union workhouses too, of which Y Dolydd at Llanfyllin is the most complete survival in Wales. Both categories of building held people whose names are in records almost nobody consults, and both are usually left off heritage trails.

The chapels. Membership peaked around 1905. A great many Powys chapels are now houses, workshops or empty with the pews still in. The burial grounds outlast the buildings and are frequently the better historical record.

The railways. The Mid-Wales line, the Brecon and Merthyr, the Lugg Valley branch, the Van and Kerry branches. Alignments, bridges, station houses in gardens, and towns of several thousand people with no train.

How to read it

Three habits help.

Count the buildings on the first edition Ordnance Survey six-inch map, then count them now. The National Library of Scotland's map viewer makes this straightforward and the results in an upland parish are usually startling.

Read the tithe apportionment, which names every field and every occupier in the 1840s and gives you a household list for a parish before the decline began.

And look at the chapel burial ground rather than the parish churchyard. Nonconformist stones record occupations, and they record emigration: the family that appears for three generations and then stops, with one late stone commemorating somebody who died in Ohio.

Why it matters

A heritage account that covers the castles, the abbeys and the market halls and leaves this out is describing a stage set. The defining experience of Powys over the last two hundred years has been people leaving, and the evidence for it is lying in the bracken above almost every farm in the county.