The Monks’ Trod: A Medieval Road Through the Cambrian Mountains

There are places in Wales where history survives because later generations found them useful, and others where it survives because the modern world largely passed them by. The Monks’ Trod belongs to both. For roughly twenty-five miles it crosses the Cambrian Mountains between the country around Strata Florida and the upper Wye valley, running through some of the most remote upland landscape in Wales before continuing towards Abbey Cwmhir in Radnorshire. In places it is a substantial terraced road. Elsewhere it narrows, fades into grass or disappears into peat and water. There are no walls or towers to announce its importance. The road itself is the monument.

I wrote about the Monks’ Trod for Nation.Cymru in June 2025 because the argument then surrounding its future seemed to expose a wider problem in the way we value the Welsh uplands. A rough track can look empty or neglected if judged only by modern standards. To a historian it may be anything but empty. Roads preserve movement, ownership, economy and memory. In the case of the Monks’ Trod, the surviving line across the hills opens a window onto the organisation of medieval Wales, the Cistercian economy, the power of the native princes and the long continuity of pastoral life in the Cambrian Mountains.

Modern archaeological work has confirmed that this was not simply a path worn into the ground by centuries of passing feet. Professor Andrew Fleming’s study of the route identified long sections built by cut-and-fill construction, where material was cut from the uphill side and used to create a terrace across the slope. Some stretches appear to have been paved or metalled, while in easier country there was apparently little need for elaborate construction. In the central section, Fleming also identified additional width which may have allowed for the movement of livestock. The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales consequently describes the Monks’ Trod as a celebrated ancient road linking the Teifi basin with the upper Wye valley.

That distinction matters. Britain has many old paths. Far fewer retain substantial evidence of medieval road engineering over such a distance. In more populated parts of the country, useful medieval routes often became later highways, repeatedly widened, straightened and resurfaced until their earlier character was buried beneath centuries of improvement. The remoteness of the Cambrian Mountains saved much of the Monks’ Trod from that fate. Its very inconvenience, which can seem a problem today, is one of the reasons so much of its historical character survives.

The Cistercians and the upland economy

The familiar explanation is that the Monks’ Trod linked the Cistercian abbeys of Strata Florida and Abbey Cwmhir. That is broadly true, but it can give the misleading impression of monks simply walking from one monastery to another across the hills. The real story is larger, because a great medieval abbey was not merely a church surrounded by cloisters. It was the centre of an extensive landed economy.

The Cistercians established themselves at Strata Florida in 1164, first at Hen Fynachlog, before moving to the site of the later abbey under the patronage of Rhys ap Gruffudd, the Lord Rhys. By the closing decades of the twelfth century Strata Florida had become one of the most important religious houses in Wales. Abbey Cwmhir developed during the same broad period, and both belonged to a wider Cistercian network which included Whitland and Strata Marcella. Their estates were not confined to the land immediately around the monastery. They stretched into grazing grounds, granges, woodland, fisheries and upland pasture scattered across central Wales.

Strata Florida’s possessions extended deep into the Elenydd. Cwmteuddwr, west of the Wye, formed part of a huge monastic grange, while other holdings and routes connected the abbey with the interior. Such land had to be worked and supervised. Animals had to be moved between pastures, rents and produce collected, messages carried, officials sent out, and servants, lay brothers, tenants and herdsmen moved through country which was difficult but economically valuable. Medieval uplands which appear almost empty to us were working landscapes.

The Monks’ Trod makes far more sense when seen as part of this system. Its line linked the Teifi country with the upper Wye and passed through or close to estates of direct importance to Strata Florida, including the country around Nannerth and Cwmteuddwr. Fleming’s reconstruction also identified a branch towards Strata Marcella near Welshpool. What looks today like an isolated track was therefore once part of a network joining monasteries, estates, grazing lands and communities across mid Wales.

The road was infrastructure. That is perhaps the simplest way of understanding its medieval importance.

Building a road across the mountains

The engineering is important because it shows intention. Where the Monks’ Trod survives as a terraced road, considerable labour was required to create it. Builders selected a workable line, cut into slopes, moved soil and stone, dealt with gradients and, in some places, provided a constructed surface. This was more than the gradual creation of a footpath.

Fleming’s work demonstrated that the road was often designed to ease movement across difficult ground. Long stretches follow contours or cross slopes obliquely rather than simply attacking the steepest gradient. Where natural ground made passage straightforward, little or no construction was necessary. Where it did not, labour was invested in producing something more reliable. The additional width found in part of the central section is especially interesting because it suggests that livestock movement may have been considered when the road was laid out.

That brings us close to the practical world of medieval Wales. A road of this kind required organisation. Someone had to decide that it was worth building, labour had to be assembled and the route had to serve a purpose important enough to justify the effort. The monasteries clearly had such a purpose, but they may not have been the only interested authority.

The Lord Rhys and the road through his Wales

Rhys ap Gruffudd, usually known as the Lord Rhys, was the dominant ruler of Deheubarth during the later twelfth century and one of the most capable Welsh princes of the Middle Ages. His patronage of Strata Florida was part of a much wider relationship between native Welsh lordship and the Cistercian order. The abbey became closely associated with the political and cultural world of the Welsh princes, and its growth took place within a landscape over which Rhys exercised considerable authority.

Fleming suggested that an engineered route across the Cambrian Mountains would have served the organisational needs of Rhys as well as those of the Cistercians. The point is persuasive, even if the precise circumstances in which individual stretches were built remain open to debate. Medieval government depended on movement. Lords required messengers, retainers and officials to cross their territories, estates needed supervision, and political authority was difficult to exercise where communication was impossible.

We naturally associate medieval power with castles because castles survive conspicuously. Roads are easier to overlook. Yet the ability to move through a territory was as important as the ability to defend it. If substantial parts of the Monks’ Trod belong to the age of the Lord Rhys, the road may preserve something unusually intimate, part of the practical infrastructure which allowed native Welsh power to function across difficult country.

There is, however, an important qualification. Fleming argued for major construction in the later twelfth century, but more recent work at Strata Florida has reopened the question of dating. Following Edward I’s campaigns in Wales, orders were issued in the late thirteenth century for woods to be cleared and passes improved around monastic estates. In 1284 Strata Florida was instructed to enlarge passes, part of a wider Edwardian effort to make routes safer and more usable for royal forces and administration. Some archaeologists have therefore suggested that engineering attributed by Fleming to the twelfth century could include later thirteenth-century improvement.

That uncertainty should not be concealed, because it makes the road more interesting rather than less. The Monks’ Trod may not represent a single moment of construction. It may preserve several phases in the history of medieval Wales, an established upland route, Cistercian organisation under the native princes, and later adaptation after the Edwardian conquest. Roads, like buildings, can have biographies.

Was the route already ancient?

There is an older possibility too. Archaeological records have long raised the possibility that parts of the Monks’ Trod followed a line which pre-dated the Cistercians, perhaps incorporating earlier tracks through a landscape already marked by prehistoric monuments and older communications. Suggestions of a relationship with Roman routes have also appeared in archaeological records, although the evidence is not strong enough to describe the Monks’ Trod itself as a Roman or prehistoric road.

The distinction is important. We do not need to make the Trod older than the evidence allows in order to recognise its significance. Medieval builders commonly used geography which had already proved practical. Mountain passes, river crossings and approaches through difficult upland country could retain their usefulness for centuries. It is entirely possible that the Cistercian and later medieval road formalised parts of an older line without that earlier route ever having possessed the same construction or purpose.

What matters is continuity. The Cambrian Mountains did not change when political systems changed around them. The same ridges, valleys, rivers and bogs continued to determine how people and animals could move. A route might therefore serve very different societies in succession while remaining recognisably the same way through the hills.

Strata Florida and the world at the western end

The importance of the road becomes clearer when we consider the places it connected. Strata Florida was not simply one abbey among many. It became one of the great institutions of medieval Wales, associated with the native princes, with burial, learning and the preservation of Welsh historical memory. Gerald of Wales and Archbishop Baldwin visited during their journey through Wales in 1188, and in 1238 Llywelyn ab Iorwerth used Strata Florida for the gathering at which Welsh rulers acknowledged his son Dafydd as his successor.

The abbey also stood at the centre of a large working estate. Monks, lay brothers, tenants, servants, messengers, visitors and herdsmen moved through the surrounding countryside. Pilgrims and political figures came to the monastery for entirely different reasons, while people whose names rarely reached the written record worked the land which sustained it. The road belongs as much to those unnamed people as it does to abbots and princes.

This is particularly important when looking at the uplands today. The apparent emptiness of the Elenydd can encourage the assumption that the country beyond the settled valleys was historically marginal. It was remote, but it was not useless. Pasture, water, fish, woodland and livestock all had economic value. Seasonal movement and dispersed settlement left a different archaeological signature from towns and villages, but the landscape was nevertheless occupied, managed and understood.

The Monks’ Trod was one of the threads which bound that dispersed world together.

Abbey Cwmhir and the Radnorshire end

At the eastern end stood Abbey Cwmhir, another Cistercian house with strong connections to the political history of medieval Wales. Its surviving ruins reveal only a fraction of the ambition of the original church, which was planned on an extraordinary scale. Cwmhir later became associated with one of the defining moments in the destruction of independent Welsh rule when the body of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was buried there following his death in December 1282.

There is something particularly evocative about a road connecting these two houses. Strata Florida became one of the great cultural and political centres of native medieval Wales, while Cwmhir received the body of its last ruling prince. Between them lay a route crossing country which was itself part of the economic and political life of the period.

The road should not be romanticised into a ceremonial highway between national shrines. Its daily purpose was almost certainly more practical. Yet that practical purpose is precisely why it matters. Medieval Wales was held together not only by battles, dynasties and monasteries, but by people moving between places, carrying messages, managing land and driving animals. The Monks’ Trod preserves part of that ordinary machinery of history.

After the monasteries

The Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century ended the religious institutions which had given the route much of its medieval importance, but it did not remove the geography which had made the road useful. The upland economy continued, farms remained, animals still had to be moved, and tracks through the mountains continued to connect communities with markets and neighbouring districts.

The Monks’ Trod became associated with the later droving landscape of Wales. Cattle and other livestock moved long distances on foot before railways and modern road transport transformed rural trade. Routes from the Welsh interior fed into a much wider network leading towards market towns and, eventually, the English Midlands and London. Not every later track used by drovers can be traced securely back to the Middle Ages, but the continued use of the Monks’ Trod fits the broader pattern of old routes acquiring new purposes as the society around them changed.

That long afterlife matters. The road is not important simply because monks may once have travelled along it. Its history belongs equally to farmers, herdsmen, drovers and rural communities for whom the mountains were not scenery but working country. Medieval monastic landholding and later pastoral agriculture were different systems, but both depended upon understanding and moving through the same physical landscape.

Why roughness is part of the evidence

Modern roads teach us to regard roughness as a defect. Water is drained, gradients eased, surfaces levelled and difficult sections rebuilt. On a functioning highway that is sensible. Applied without discrimination to an ancient route, however, the same instinct can remove the very features which make it historically important.

The survival of the Monks’ Trod owes much to the fact that it never became an important modern road. It escaped the repeated widening, resurfacing and realignment which erased the early character of so many old routes elsewhere. Sections still survive as terraced road, raised track and worn line across the open upland. The relationship between the route and the surrounding ground can itself contain archaeological information about construction, drainage, later use and the changing condition of the peat.

This does not mean that every patch of mud is medieval or that nothing should ever be repaired. Historic routes can be damaged by erosion, waterlogging and uncontrolled use just as surely as they can be damaged by over-engineering. Conservation sometimes requires intervention. The question is what kind of intervention, how much, and for whose benefit.

The Monks’ Trod should not be judged as though it were an inadequate modern road waiting to be completed. Its unevenness and difficulty are part of a much older relationship between route and landscape. Once that relationship is replaced by a standardised modern surface, it cannot simply be put back.

The modern argument over access

That tension has been visible for decades. Damage caused by recreational motor vehicles led to restrictions on parts of the route, including a Traffic Regulation Order in 1990 which prohibited four-wheeled vehicles from the most vulnerable section. The western uplands also carry major environmental designations, reflecting the importance of the blanket bog, habitats and bird life of the Elenydd.

More recently, proposals by Powys County Council to create a more durable unsealed surface on part of the Trod produced a sharp argument about what conservation should mean. The council’s position was that the legal status of the route created access responsibilities and that a defined, resilient line could reduce damage caused when users avoid the wettest sections and spread onto surrounding ground. Trail-riding interests likewise argued that a properly maintained route could reconcile access with environmental protection.

Opponents feared that the remedy would change the character of the place it was supposed to protect. Their concern was not simply that stone might be laid on peat, but that improving the road for motorised use could encourage further traffic through an exceptionally fragile historic and natural landscape. The debate is therefore more complicated than a choice between maintenance and neglect. Both neglect and excessive intervention can cause damage.

For me, the starting point has to be the historical significance of the route itself. Before work is designed around the needs of a modern user, we should ask what survives, what is archaeologically sensitive, how water and peat behave, and what will be lost if a particular section is widened, raised or resurfaced. Conservation should dictate the engineering, not be fitted around it afterwards.

Preservation does not mean abandonment

There is a danger in arguing that the Monks’ Trod should be kept “as it is” if those words are taken to mean that nothing should ever be done. An ancient road left to uncontrolled erosion can disappear just as effectively as one buried beneath inappropriate resurfacing. The better principle is minimum necessary intervention, guided by archaeology, ecology and the historic character of the landscape.

Where surviving medieval fabric exists, it should be retained. Where erosion is threatening the route, repair should be carefully targeted. Where drainage is necessary, it should be designed with an understanding of the surrounding peat and hydrology. New material should not be introduced simply because it makes the route easier for a particular modern form of recreation. Above all, the Monks’ Trod should continue to look and feel like an old upland road rather than a newly constructed trail laid across the place where an old road used to be.

That distinction is fundamental. Heritage conservation is not the same as freezing a landscape at an arbitrary date, but neither is it the process of making old places conform to modern expectations of convenience. Sometimes the value of a historic place lies precisely in the fact that it still asks us to accommodate ourselves to it.

What the Monks’ Trod tells us about medieval Wales

The greatest importance of the Monks’ Trod is that it makes a part of medieval life visible which written history can easily obscure. Chronicles record rulers, wars and deaths. Monastic cartularies record grants and property. Castles and abbeys dominate photographs because they are monumental. A road tells a different story.

It tells us that upland Wales was organised. It tells us that religious houses depended upon estates far beyond their precinct walls. It tells us that people invested labour in improving movement across difficult country. It suggests the passage of horses and livestock, the supervision of granges and the carrying of messages between communities which were separated by considerable distances. It may preserve traces of the administrative world of the Lord Rhys, and it may also carry evidence of the changes imposed after Edward I’s conquest.

Most importantly, it reconnects the great names of medieval Welsh history with the landscape in which ordinary people lived and worked. Rhys ap Gruffudd and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd belong to this story, but so do the unnamed men who dug the terrace into a hillside, the herdsman following cattle across the moor, the messenger carrying news through rain, and the generations of farmers and drovers who continued to use the old way after the monasteries were gone.

That is why the Trod is more than a recreational route. It is a surviving piece of the infrastructure of medieval and rural Wales.

The value of leaving the mountains recognisable

When I wrote about the Monks’ Trod for Nation.Cymru in 2025, I described its protection as part of safeguarding the soul of Wales’ upland culture. I would still use that phrase, but the historical case for protection is stronger than sentiment alone. The road has survived because successive generations altered it less drastically than they altered most comparable routes. What remains is therefore both physical evidence and landscape memory.

The Cambrian Mountains are often described in terms of emptiness, wilderness and isolation. Those words can be misleading. The hills are full of human history, but much of it is written lightly. A ruined farm, an enclosure bank, a sheepfold, a hollow way or a terrace across a slope may be the surviving evidence of communities which left few substantial buildings and little written testimony. Once such features are removed, their stories become harder to recover.

The Monks’ Trod is especially powerful because distance can still be experienced along it. The hills have not been reduced to a backdrop. Weather, gradient, ground and remoteness remain part of the journey, allowing us to understand something of what movement through central Wales meant before railways and metalled highways conquered distance. That experience is historical in itself.

There will be places where the road needs careful conservation, and there will continue to be legitimate arguments about access. What should not be negotiable is the principle that the historic route and the landscape through which it passes come first. We do not preserve an ancient road by rebuilding it until the ancient road has disappeared beneath the solution.

Some monuments dominate their surroundings. The Monks’ Trod does the opposite. It lies quietly within the hills, sometimes obvious, sometimes barely visible, and depends upon the landscape for much of its meaning. That modesty should not be mistaken for insignificance.

For eight centuries or more, people have crossed these mountains along substantially the same line. Monks, servants, herdsmen, messengers, drovers, farmers and travellers have all belonged to its history. What survives today is not simply a way from one place to another. It is evidence of how medieval Wales functioned, how rural Wales endured and how an apparently empty landscape carried generations of movement across it.

The responsibility of our own generation is not to make the Monks’ Trod easier to conquer. It is to make certain that those who come after us can still recognise what history left behind.

Sources and Further Reading

Andrew Fleming, “The Making of a Medieval Road: The Monk’s Trod Routeway, Mid Wales”, Landscapes, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2009, pp. 77–100.

Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, Coflein, NPRN 23712, Monks’ Trod, including records of the road between the Teifi basin and upper Wye valley and the results of fieldwork by Andrew Fleming and Louise Barker.

Archaeology Wales, Monk’s Trod, Rhayader: Desk-Based Assessment, Walkover Survey and Archaeological Watching Brief, 2018.

David Austin and others, research on the archaeology and medieval landscape of Strata Florida, including discussion of thirteenth-century Edwardian road and pass improvements on the abbey’s estates.

Cadw and the Strata Florida Trust, historical material relating to Strata Florida Abbey, its Cistercian estates and its political and cultural importance in medieval Wales.

Monastic Wales, records for Strata Florida and Abbey Cwmhir, including their foundations, affiliations, estates and associations with the Welsh princes.

Cambrian Mountains Society, material relating to the Monks’ Trod, the historic environment of the Elenydd and the modern debate over the protection of the route.

Powys County Council, public-rights-of-way and Traffic Regulation Order material relating to the Monks’ Trod.

Antony David Davies, “Monks Trod: safeguarding the soul of Wales’ upland culture”, Nation.Cymru, 29 June 2025.