What Is Being Lost Now

Almost everything else on this site is about the past. This page is about the last twenty years and the next twenty, because there is a category of building disappearing from Powys now that will be very difficult to reconstruct afterwards.

Chapels

The largest and plainest building in most Powys villages, and the institution that taught rural Wales to read, is going.

Membership peaked around 1905 and has fallen continuously since. Congregations that were a hundred are now six, all of them elderly, maintaining a building that needs a roof.

The outcomes are: conversion to a house, which usually removes the gallery, the pulpit, the pews and the internal volume that made the building what it was; sale for storage or workshop; or dereliction and eventual demolition.

Very few Powys chapels are listed, because listing is weighted towards architectural distinction and the whole point of a chapel is that it is plain. The interior is frequently the significant part — the arrangement of pulpit, sêt fawr and gallery — and interiors are exactly what conversion removes.

Coflein's Chapels of Wales survey and the work of Capel have recorded a great many. A lot are being lost faster than they are being recorded.

Farm buildings

Traditional farm buildings were designed for a system of agriculture that no longer exists.

A stone-built range with a threshing floor, stalls for six cows and a granary above is useless to a farm running a modern flock with contractors and machinery. It is too small, the doors are too narrow and the floors will not take the weight.

So they are converted to dwellings, which is generally the only economic option, or they are left and the roof goes. A building without a roof has about a decade.

Field barns are worse. An isolated stone barn out in the fields has no conversion market and no agricultural use, and it is invisible to almost everybody. They are the most rapidly disappearing category of historic building in upland Wales.

Boundaries

Hedgerows and drystone walls are the historic record of enclosure, ownership and land use, and they are expensive to maintain.

A wall that falls is usually replaced by a fence, because a fence costs a fraction of the price and takes a day. Once a wall has gone, the line usually survives, but the fabric — and the dating evidence in it — does not.

Species-rich old hedges are lost to over-flailing, gappy removal and neglect.

Chapel and churchyard memorials

Inscriptions weather, and in some churchyards stones are laid flat or removed on safety grounds. The information on them — relationships, occupations, emigrations, the language a family used — is frequently recorded nowhere else.

Mine and quarry structures

Consolidation is expensive and most industrial remains are unscheduled. Engine houses, kilns and wheelpits collapse quietly. Some are cleared as unsafe.

What can be done

Recording is cheap and it works. Photographs with a date and a grid reference, submitted to the Historic Environment Record through Archwilio or to Coflein, become part of the permanent record. That is genuinely useful and anybody can do it.

Photograph before conversion, not after. A chapel interior takes ten minutes to record and will not exist in two years.

Report damage to scheduled monuments to Cadw. Ploughing, vehicle tracks and unauthorised works on Offa's Dyke and on upland sites happen regularly and are frequently unreported.

Transcribe memorial inscriptions if a churchyard has not been done. Family history societies will take the results.

Support the trusts doing the restoration work: Y Dolydd at Llanfyllin, Hay Castle, Talgarth Mill, the Bleddfa Centre. Several exist on volunteer labour and small grants.

Why this is on a heritage site

Because a resource that treats heritage as finished, and confined to castles and abbeys, misses what is happening this year in nearly every village in the county.

The material this site is built on — Coflein, Archwilio, the county journals, the listing descriptions — exists because people took the trouble to record things while they were still there. That is not a completed job.