Old Radnor Church, home of the oldest font in Britain
WITH A POPULATION of some 2500, Presteigne is THE SMALLEST COUNTY TOWN IN ENGLAND AND WALES. And one of the most attractive. It perches sleepily on the west bank of the River Lugg, which here forms the border with England, and for those travelling along the coach road from London to Aberystwyth it was for a long time known as the first town in Wales.
Although Presteigne was bypassed long ago, there are several inns in the town that survive from the days of horse and coach. Perhaps the most eye-catching is the superb black and white Radnorshire Arms, which dates from 1616 and is said to have a number of secret passages and priest’s holes. The house is thought to have been built originally for one of Queen Elizabeth I’s favourite courtiers, Sir Christopher Hatton, Captain of the Queen’s Bodyguard and Lord Chancellor, after whom Hatton Garden, London’s diamond centre, is named. The house eventually passed on to the Bradshaw family, one of whom, John Bradshaw, was the Lord President of the High Court of Justice that presided over the trial of Charles I. His was the first signature on the King’s death warrant.
The galleried Duke’s Arms is RADNORSHIRE’S OLDEST INN. It replaced one that was burned down by Owain Glyndwr in 1401.
The jewel in Presteigne’s crown is the former Shire Hall, an impressive Georgian building now known as ‘THE JUDGE’S LODGINGS’. It was built in 1829 and described by Lord Chief Justice Campbell in 1855 as ‘the most commodious and elegant apartments for a judge in all England and Wales’. Now a museum, it has been restored inside to look as it would have appeared in the 1870s and proudly shows off THE ONLY WORKING EXAMPLE OF A GAS-POWERED CHAND ELIER IN BRITAIN.
Also on display is the original headstone of 17-year-old Mary Morgan, who was sentenced to death in 1805 for killing her new-born baby with a kitchen knife. She was THE LAST WOMAN IN WALES TO BE PUBLICLY EXECUTED, and this headstone tells of her ‘sin and shame’. However, some thought that Mary had been seduced by a local squire who was sitting on the jury that condemned her, and the people of Presteigne erected a second headstone to her which bears the inscription ‘He that is without sin among you, let him cast a stone at her’.
This headstone is in the churchyard of St Andrew’s, a Saxon foundation and the church which gives the town its Welsh name of Llanandras. The church’s finest treasure is a 16th-century Flemish tapestry, ONE OF ONLY TWO PRE-REFORMATION TAPESTRIES TO BE FOUND IN A CHURCH IN BRITAIN.
A prominent member of the jury who condemned Mary Morgan was ADMIRAL SIR PETER PUGET, whose family lived at the Red House, a redbrick house in Broad Street. As a commander, Admiral Puget had sailed with Captain Vancouver to survey the west coast of America. Puget Sound and Puget Island are named after him.
DEEP IN THE countryside west of Presteigne, approached along a grassy track, is the gorgeous little church of OUR LADY OF PILLETH. Six hundred years ago, in 1402, the church found itself in the middle of the Battle of Pilleth, when the forces of Owain Glyndwr defeated those of Edmund Mortimer, inflicting heavy casualties. Many are buried in the churchyard or on the steep hillside above, and bones are still regularly turned up. In the 19th century, the local MP Sir Richard Green-Price planted four tall Wellingtonia fir trees to mark where the Welsh soldiers were buried, and placed a stone monument in the churchyard in memory of the English dead. The church was also a casualty of the fighting, being badly damaged. In 1894 a fire almost completed the destruction, but the church is now almost fully restored. Despite its violent history, or maybe because of it, the little white church on the side of the hill is today a heavenly, peaceful place.
KNIGHTON IS THE only town that stands right on Offa’s Dyke, BRITAIN’S LONGEST ARCHAEOLOGICAL MONUMENT. The Dyke was built toward the end of the 8th century by the Saxon King Offa, to separate Mercia from the kingdoms of the Welsh. It was THE FIRST OFFICIAL BORDER BETWEEN ENGLAND AND WALES, and the line of the modern boundary of today is not substantially different.
According to the 19th-century writer of Wild Wales, George Borrow, ‘It was customary for the English to cut off the ears of every Welshman who was found to the east of the dyke, and for the Welsh to hang every Englishman found to the west of it.’
The Dyke ran for 149 miles (240 km) from the River Severn near Chepstow to the sea at Prestatyn. For most of the way it consisted of a ditch and rampart, some 89 ft (27 m) wide and 26 ft (8 m) high, from the bottom of the ditch to the top of the bank. The ditch was on the Welsh side. Some 80 miles (129 km) of the Dyke is still traceable, with the best-preserved sections being found near Knighton, home of the Offa’s Dyke Centre, which gives information about the 170-mile (274 km) long-distance footpath which broadly follows the line of the Dyke along the Welsh Marches.
Just outside Knighton, the Heart of Wales railway line, running from Shrewsbury to Swansea, crosses the Teme valley on the 13 arches of one of the engineering marvels of the Victorian age, the 70-ft (21 m) high neo-Gothic Knucklas Viaduct, built in 1863.
King Arthur is believed to have lived in a castle at Knucklas with his wife Guinevere. The Norman castle was destroyed by Llywelyn ap Gruffudd in 1262.
THE PEACEFUL VILLAGE of CLYRO, set in low rolling hills and looking out over the Wye valley to the Black Mountains, has found fame through the lyrical diaries of the REVD FRANCIS KILVERT (1840–79), curate here from 1865 to 1872. His affectionate and perceptive descriptions of Victorian life in this small village, and the surrounding Radnorshire countryside, have become a minor classic. Opposite the Baskerville Arms there is a memorial plaque to Kilvert on the wall of Ashbrook House, where he lived and wrote. Although the gentle world that Kilvert observed is now lost, there is still something in Clyro of the wistful atmosphere that his diaries evoke.
CLYRO COURT, a Jacobean-style manor house just outside the village, was built for the local landowner Thomas Baskerville. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stayed here while writing his most famous Sherlock Holmes tale, The Hound of the Baskervilles. Although he set the story on Dartmoor, it is possible that he based the plot on the local legend of evil squire Sir Thomas Vaughan of Hergest Court, across the border in Herefordshire. Black Vaughan and his ghostly hound The Black Dog of Hergest are said to haunt the Marcher lands hereabouts.
LLANDRINDOD WELLS IS Radnorshire’s largest town, and the only one of a string of famous 19th-century Welsh spa towns, the others being Builth Wells, Llanwrtyd Wells and Llangamarch Wells, that still offer spa facilities. You can take the sulphur and magnesium spring waters at the spa room, and there are tea-rooms, rock gardens and ravishing scenery. Visitors have been coming here since the 17th century, but it was the arrival of the railway that really launched Llandrindod Wells as a fashionable health resort and holiday destination. It remains an almost perfect model of an unspoilt Victorian town with elegant villas, comfortable hotels and attractive wrought-iron canopies across the pavements. A Victorian Festival is held every summer, when traffic is banned from the town centre and the local people dress up in Victorian garb.
Buried in the old parish churchyard is TOM NORTON (1870–1955), friend of Henry Ford and WALES’S FIRST TRANSPORT SUPREMO. In1912, he opened THE FIRST FORD AGENCY IN WALES and introduced WALES’S FIRST BUS SERVICE, from Llandrindod to Newtown. Both were based in the exotic art deco Automobile Palace which is now home to the National Cycle Exhibition. Tom Norton was President of the Fellowship of Old Time Cyclists, whose membership was restricted to those who were born before 1873 and had ridden a penny farthing before they reached the age of 17.
WHEN THE WATER is low in the Caban Coch reservoir, the haunting remains of a fine mansion can be seen emerging from the icy water, a place that once echoed with laughter and poetry, a house once filled with parties and gaiety and fun. For this was NANTGWYLLT HOUSE, where the poet Shelley and his child bride Harriet came to live in 1812, and dreamed of setting up a community of friends and poets and philosophers.
Shelley had fallen in love with the beautiful and remote Elan Valley the previous year, when he had walked here from his home in Sussex to stay with his uncle Thomas Grove at Cwm Elan, a big house just across the hills from Nantgwyllt. He spent his time exploring and sailing his cat down the river in a paper boat, using his only five-pound note as a sail. After eloping to Edinburgh to get married, Shelley brought Harriet back to Nantgwyllt, which they were both desperate to buy for their new home.
It was not to be. They could not raise the money, and at the end of the summer of 1812 they left, never to return. As Harriet wrote, ‘you may imagine our sorrow at leaving so desirable a spot, where every beauty seems centred.’ Two years later Shelley abandoned his young wife for Mary Godwin (who would later write the Gothic horror novel Frankenstein), and the unhappy Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine in London’s Hyde Park. Shelley himself drowned in the sea off Tuscany in 1822. And Nantgwyllt House drowned beneath the rising waters of the Caban Coch reservoir in 1904.
There was a long-held belief that Nantgwyllt was still intact when it was engulfed, which may have inspired Francis Brett Young to write his 1932 novel The House Beneath the Water. This tale was disproved, however, when the demolished remains were first sighted again during a drought in 1937.
A celebrated daughter of Nantgwyllt House was EMMELINE LEWIS LLOYD who, in the mid 19th century, became the eighth woman to climb Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc. There is a memorial to her in St Bride’s church in Cwmdeuddwr.
The Elan Valley was drowned at the end of the 19th century to provide drinking water for the rapidly expanding industrial city of Birmingham. In THE BIGGEST CONSTRUCTION PROJECT OF THE VICTORIAN ERA, involving a series of large dams, 100 inhabitants of the valley were moved, while three manor houses (including Nantgwyllt and Cwm Elan), 18 farms, a school and a church were all lost. Because the area is relatively high, the water is transported the 73 miles (117 km) to Birmingham by gravity, obviating the need for pumps.
The newest and largest of the dams is the Claerwen Dam, which was opened in 1952 by the Queen in one of her first official engagements as the monarch. It is one of the highest gravity dams in Britain, 184 ft (56 m) high and 1,165 ft (355 m) across. It is also the only one of the dams to be made of concrete and is dressed with stone to harmonize with the earlier dams. A working farmhouse sits right underneath the colossal looming wall, seemingly quite unconcerned by the huge mass of water held back just yards away.
The five man-made lakes stretch for almost 9 miles (14 km) and are surrounded by glorious scenery which attracts walkers and cyclists, while birdwatchers come to see once rare red kites wheeling majestically in the skies. When the reservoirs are full, water cascades in sparkling silver sheets down the face of the dams, creating a spectacular show.
HARD TO BELIEVE, but papers, personal effects, doodlings, musings and mementoes of one of the great geniuses of all time, a man who did more than almost any other to create the modern world, were hidden away in a quiet Radnorshire valley for over 100 years. In 1785, James Watt, the engineer, inventor and pioneer of steam engines, whose name is immortalised on every light bulb, bought DOLDOWLOD HALL, 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Llanwrthwl, near Rhayader, as a retirement home. Watt himself designed and built a portion of the hall, and after his death in 1819, his descendants continued to live there. In 1899, Watt’s papers, personal possessions and many of the contents of his workshop in Heathfield, Birmingham, were all brought to Doldowlod, where they remained until the death of his great-great-great-grandson, Lord Gibson-Watt, in 2002.
David Gibson-Watt was Conservative MP for Hereford from 1956 until 1974, Minister of State at the Welsh Office, and proud guardian of his ancestor’s secret treasure trove at Doldowlod. After Gibson-Watt died, a number of James Watt’s personal items, such as his spectacles, watch and walking stick, were sold at auction at Sotheby’s, raising almost £2 million. Perhaps the most intriguing lot was a personal account by Watt’s cousin, Jane Campbell, of the ‘kettle incident’, that seminal moment when the teenage Watt realised the possibilities of steam power while playing with a steaming kettle.
THIS OLD RADNORSHIRE rhyme could be said to hold true today, for there are still few big houses or large towns in this most rural of counties. The lands of Abbeycwmhir passed to the Fowler family of the rhyme at the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but by then there was little left of the abbey itself. It had been sacked by Owain Glyndwr, who suspected the monks of supporting the English.
The name, meaning ‘abbey in the long valley’, is all that now points to the historic importance of this tiny hamlet, set in a tranquil valley amongst the high, forested hills east of Rhayader. A church, a big house with gables, a farm and the Happy Union Inn are left to stand sentinel over one of the most evocative places in Welsh history. A gate opposite the farm gives access to the scant remains of what was once THE LARGEST ABBEY IN WALES, a Cistercian house, founded in 1143, that boasted a nave 242 ft (74 m) in length – longer than any church in Britain save Durham or Winchester.
A hawthorn tree now grows in place of the high altar, and a modern stone slab marks the spot where the headless body of LLYWELYN AP GRUFFUDD, THE LAST NATIVE PRINCE OF WALES, was secretly laid to rest by the monks, after he was slain at Cilmeri (see Breconshire) in 1282. His head had been sent to London to be paraded through the streets as a symbol of Edward I’s domination of Wales.
Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Gwynedd, also known as Llywelyn Ein Llyw Olaf or Llywelyn the Last, is one of the greatest Welsh heroes, and even today his grave at lonely Abbeycwmhir is a place of pilgrimage. Grandson of Llywelyn Fawr, or Llywelyn the Great, he ruthlessly united many of the old Welsh kingdoms under his rule and took advantage of the weakness of Henry III to gain recognition from the English king as the true Prince of Wales, by the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267. When Edward I came to the throne in 1272, Llywelyn misjudged the new King’s strength and refused to pay due tribute or swear his allegiance. Edward determined to deal with the troublesome Welsh Prince and a ten-year struggle ensued, ending at Cilmeri in 1282, when Llywelyn died – and with him all hopes of an independent Wales. As one Welsh poet put it, ‘Oh God! That the sea might engulf the land! Oh, why are we left to our long weary darkness?’
RADNORSHIRE is THE MOST SPARSELY POPULATED COUNTY IN ENGLAND OR WALES.
The ancient hilltop settlement of OLD RADNOR is now not much more than a church – but what a church. Sublimely beautiful, 15th-century, set 840 ft (256 m) up on a hill in a prehistoric circular enclosure, and THE ONLY CHURCH IN WALES DEDICATED TO ST STEPHEN. The font is THE OLDEST FONT IN BRITAIN, a scooped-out igneous boulder used as an altar stone in the Bronze Age, and somehow connected to the numerous standing stones that run north to south past Old Radnor. It was a font in a church on this site as far back as the 6th or 7th century. Even more precious, and a remarkable find in such a remote country church, is the matchless, early 16th-century organ case, THE OLDEST OF ITS KIND IN BRITAIN, a treasure beyond compare and one that would grace the grandest cathedral. Hidden away, high up and hard to find, amongst the rocks above the village of ABEREDW is a small cave where Llywelyn the Last hid on the night before he was killed in 1282 (see above). Legend has it that he went to the blacksmith in Aberedw to have the shoes of his horse reversed, so as to confuse the English who were tracking him.
The doors of the lonely 13th-century church at CREGINA once sported the paws of a wolf, said to be those of THE LAST WOLF KILLED IN WALES, during the reign of Elizabeth I.
Erected in 1717, PALES MEETING HOUSE in Llandegley is THE OLDEST CONTINUOUSLY USED QUAKER MEETING HOUSE IN WALES.
HERGEST RIDGE is a ridge of hills that straddles the border of England and Radnorshire, south of Presteigne. MIKE OLDFIELD, the composer of the classic album Tubular Bells (the record which set Virgin Records founder Sir Richard Branson on the road to fortune) called his second album Hergest Ridge, having moved to the area to escape media attention brought about by the success of the first. The Red Book of Hergest is one of the sources for the Mabinogion (see Pembrokeshire).
Radnorshire has THE LOWEST LEVELS OF LIGHT POLLUTION IN ENGLAND AND WALES, a quality that attracted former Army officer Jay Tate to set up BRITAIN’S FIRST SPACEGUARD CENTRE, at an observatory on top of a hill 2 miles (3.2 km) south of Knighton. The aim of the centre is to gather information on Near Earth Objects such as comets and asteroids, and to monitor their threat to Earth. The centre, the observatory and a planetarium can all be visited by appointment.
