Buildings Made from What Was There

Before cheap transport, you built with whatever was within a few miles, because carting stone was more expensive than the stone. That makes vernacular buildings a geology map that people lived in.

The materials

Old red sandstone in the south, in the Usk valley and the Black Mountains: warm, brownish-purple, easy to work, and it weathers beautifully. Brecon and Crickhowell are built of it.

Silurian mudstones and grits through the middle of the county: grey, hard, awkward, laid in thin uneven courses with a lot of mortar. Radnorshire and much of Montgomeryshire.

Timber frame along the eastern border, continuous with Herefordshire and Shropshire and fading out three or four miles into Wales. Box frame in the lowlands, cruck frame — pairs of curved timbers rising from ground level to the ridge — much more widely.

Roofing shifts with the railways. Before them, stone tiles or thatch. Afterwards, north Wales slate everywhere, including on buildings two centuries older, because it was suddenly cheap and lighter than what it replaced.

The longhouse

The characteristic old building of upland Powys is a long low range under one roof containing the family at one end and the cattle at the other, with a cross-passage between them.

The byre end is downslope so that the drainage runs away from the living end. There is often a croglofft, a sleeping loft over the lower end of the house reached by a ladder.

They are not primitive. Sharing a roof with stock was warm, saved building, and kept animals under supervision on ground where losing a cow mattered. The Black Mountains and the Radnorshire uplands have the best survivals, generally with the byre converted and the cross-passage blocked.

Radnorshire's surprise

Radnorshire has an extraordinary concentration of surviving late medieval timber houses, considerably more than a poor upland county has any business having.

The reason appears to be a building boom in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, after the Glyndŵr revolt, when a substantial middling class of Welsh freeholders rebuilt in timber all at once. Dendrochronology has dated a remarkable number of Radnorshire houses to a few decades either side of 1500.

Reading a house

Windows date it faster than anything. Small square-headed mullioned openings are sixteenth or seventeenth century. Regular sashes in a symmetrical front are Georgian, and very often a new front put on a much older house.

Chimneys. A lateral chimney on the side wall, or a massive gable stack, generally indicates the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when open hearths were replaced. Before that, smoke went through the roof.

Blocked openings. A cross-passage doorway filled in, a byre door turned into a window, a lowered floor level. Almost every old Powys farmhouse has been through two or three reorganisations and they are usually visible in the stonework.

Datestones are common and are usually the date of a remodelling rather than the original build.

Farm buildings

Often more informative than the house, and disappearing faster.

Bank barns cut into a slope so a cart can be driven in at first-floor level. Granaries raised on staddle stones against rats. Cartsheds with open arcades. Wheelhouses, round or polygonal projections where a horse walked a circle to drive threshing machinery inside.

Chapels

The other universal Powys building, and a distinct tradition. Rectangular, gable-entry or long-wall entry, round-headed windows, rendered or in local stone, with a date plaque. Plain outside and often surprisingly good inside: a gallery on three sides, a big central pulpit, and pine boarding.

They are the largest buildings in most Powys villages and they are being lost faster than anything else in the county's built heritage.