Rhayader: The Making of a Radnorshire Market Town

Rhayader is a small town, but its size gives a misleading impression of the part it has played in the history of the upper Wye. For centuries it served a countryside extending far beyond the streets of the town itself. Farmers came here to sell livestock and buy supplies, travellers crossed the Wye, courts and local institutions conducted their business here, and later the railway brought people and goods from much farther afield. At the end of the nineteenth century the construction of the Elan Valley reservoirs brought an altogether different population into the district. Rhayader’s history is therefore closely tied to movement, to the river crossing, the roads, the markets and fairs, the railway and eventually the traffic of visitors making their way into the Elan Valley.

The geography explains much of this. Rhayader stands where routes through central Wales meet the upper Wye, with Cwmdeuddwr immediately across the river. Although the two developed as separate communities, their histories have always been closely connected. Long before the modern town developed, people were using and settling the surrounding landscape. Prehistoric finds, including material of Neolithic and Bronze Age date, show that this part of the upper Wye had been occupied for thousands of years. The beginnings of Rhayader as a recognisable town, however, belong to the medieval period, when control of the river crossing became politically and militarily important.

The waterfall, the river and the castle

Rhayader takes its name from the Welsh rhaeadr, a waterfall or cataract. Medieval forms include Rayadyr Gwy, the waterfall of the Wye. The feature which gave the town its name once lay close to the crossing, although it was greatly altered when the river was modified during construction of the stone bridge in the late eighteenth century. By improving the crossing, the town effectively lost much of the natural feature from which its name had come.

Before the stone bridge there had been an earlier timber bridge and, before that, a ford. This was the essential reason for the settlement’s importance. Cwmdeuddwr occupied the western bank, while the town which became Rhayader developed on the eastern side. Anyone controlling the crossing also controlled an important route into the central Welsh uplands.

Rhys ap Gruffudd is traditionally credited with establishing a castle at Rhayader in 1177. During the turbulent decades which followed, control of the site passed between Welsh rulers and the Marcher powers, and the castle was destroyed during the campaigns of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth in 1231. The exact history is not as straightforward as older accounts sometimes suggest. Archaeologists have raised the possibility that an earlier castle may have stood on the Cwmdeuddwr side of the Wye, with the site beside Rhayader representing a later stronghold. There is not enough evidence to settle the question with certainty.

Very little survives of the castle today. Later building, erosion and disturbance removed much of what remained, while parts of the site were altered before archaeological remains received the protection they would now be given. The limited survival should not be taken as evidence that the castle was insignificant. Rhayader stood at a strategic crossing during a period when this part of Wales was repeatedly contested.

From settlement to borough

By the fourteenth century Rhayader had developed beyond its military beginnings. It was referred to as a vill in 1304, while accounts from later in the century record burgage rents. Burgage holdings are important because they point to an organised urban community, with plots held under the customs associated with a borough.

No surviving charter creating the borough has been identified. Rhayader appears instead to have enjoyed its status by prescription, through rights and customs which had become established over time. Markets and fairs formed an important part of this identity and remained central to the town for centuries.

It is tempting to look at the meeting of North, South, East and West Streets and assume that the whole layout belongs to a single phase of medieval planning. The archaeological evidence suggests a more gradual development. The earliest concentration of settlement may have been nearer the castle and the western part of the town, with the familiar crossroads developing or becoming more important as Rhayader expanded eastwards. Like many small towns, it probably evolved in stages rather than being laid out in one deliberate operation.

Rhayader was affected by the rising of Owain Glyndŵr in the early fifteenth century, but the settlement recovered and retained its regional importance. Following the creation of Radnorshire under the legislation of Henry VIII, Rhayader was initially named alongside New Radnor as a place where county judicial business could be conducted. That arrangement did not last, and by the middle of the sixteenth century the assizes had been transferred to Presteigne, helping to establish that town as the judicial centre of Radnorshire. A later tradition linked the removal of the courts to violence in Rhayader, including a story that a judge had been murdered there. The transfer itself is well established, but the more colourful explanation is better treated as tradition.

The borough identity nevertheless survived. Into the nineteenth century Rhayader retained civic customs including an annually elected bailiff and burgesses associated with the manor court. It was also one of the contributory boroughs connected with the parliamentary borough of New Radnor. These arrangements continued until the parliamentary system was reformed in the later nineteenth century. They are a reminder that Rhayader’s importance was never simply a matter of population.

The market town

The market was probably the institution which most consistently shaped everyday life in Rhayader. The town served an extensive agricultural hinterland stretching through Cwmdeuddwr, St Harmon, Nantmel and the Elan country. Sheep, cattle, wool and other produce were brought in from scattered farms, while goods and services which could not readily be obtained in the countryside were available in the town.

On market days Rhayader must have looked and sounded very different from an ordinary day. Farmers, dealers, auctioneers and carriers mixed with shopkeepers, craftsmen, bank clerks, solicitors and innkeepers. Livestock moved through streets which today carry motor traffic, and the inns did brisk business among people who might have travelled several miles to reach town. For many living in isolated farms and valleys, a visit to Rhayader was as much a social occasion as a commercial one.

Hiring fairs added another element. Agricultural labourers and domestic servants could come into town to seek employment for the coming term, while farmers and households looked for workers. Local tradition recalled prospective employees displaying signs of their occupation, a shepherd, for example, carrying wool. Whatever the precise form taken by the custom at different periods, hiring fairs belonged to a rural society in which the market town brought employers and labour together.

A Market and Town Hall was erected in 1762 directly in the crossroads. The lower part served the market, while the upper floor provided space for civic and public business. Its position says much about eighteenth-century Rhayader. The market was not something located at the edge of town, it occupied the centre of it.

By the twentieth century the position which had once made the building so convenient had become a problem. Complaints that it obstructed the streets were already being made in the nineteenth century, and motor traffic intensified the difficulty. Contemporary court reporting shows that the old Market Hall had been demolished by May 1922, when motorists were already being described as crossing the “site of the old market hall”. The war memorial clock followed in 1924 and was unveiled later that year. The longer history of the building, its trustees, the 1905 Charity Commission inquiry and its disappearance is examined in Rhayader’s Lost Market Hall: Life at the Crossroads of a Radnorshire Market Town.

Roads, bridge and rebellion

The stone bridge across the Wye was completed in 1780, replacing an earlier crossing and making the route through Rhayader more dependable. Better roads and bridges benefited the town. Agricultural produce could reach wider markets, manufactured goods could be brought in more easily, mail travelled more reliably, and inns benefited from growing road traffic.

The improvement of roads was not universally welcomed. Turnpike trusts financed much of the work through tolls, and for farmers who regularly travelled with livestock or goods those charges could become a considerable burden. A journey might involve paying at several gates before reaching its destination.

Rhayader was consequently drawn into the unrest associated with the Rebecca disturbances of the 1840s. The attacks upon tollgates have often been remembered for their disguises and drama, but behind them were practical grievances about the cost of using roads which rural communities depended upon. For Rhayader, a town whose prosperity was closely connected with people and goods being able to move through it, the issue was especially relevant. The local crisis, the destruction of the gates and the later survival of Rebecca as a salmon-poaching tradition are examined in When Rebecca Came to Rhayader: Toll Gates, Salmon and the Long Afterlife of Rural Protest.

Mills, wool and leather

Although Rhayader never became an industrial town on the scale of those in south or north-east Wales, it had a varied local manufacturing economy. The river and streams provided power, while the surrounding farms supplied wool, hides and grain.

Melin Gwynllyn, later known as Upper Mill, had a history stretching back into the seventeenth century and was associated with woollen production by the early eighteenth century. Fron Factory, or March Melin, was another water-powered woollen mill, and other sites were used for corn milling, fulling and related work. The Wye and its tributaries were therefore part of a working landscape as well as the scenery later admired by visitors.

Leatherworking was equally well suited to the local economy. The Rhayader tannery survived long enough to become the last traditional tannery of its kind operating in Wales and was eventually preserved at St Fagans. Hides passed through a lengthy process using oak bark before the resulting heavy leather could be turned into boots, harness and other goods needed in an agricultural society heavily dependent upon horses.

The industry demonstrates the close relationship between Rhayader and the countryside. Farmers supplied cattle and hides, local woodland provided bark, craftsmen carried out the tanning and rural customers bought much of the finished product. Town and country were parts of the same economy rather than separate worlds.

Later uses of water power included electricity generation. In the twentieth century the Rhayader Electric Light and Power Company supplied the town using water power, with other machinery available when required. The same river which had determined the position of the settlement continued to have an economic purpose long after the medieval crossing had lost its strategic significance.

Inns, religion and local custom

Some of the older buildings in Rhayader preserve traces of the town before its Victorian rebuilding. The Old Swan has seventeenth-century origins, while the Royal Oak and other properties retain fabric from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Buildings such as these were part of the practical infrastructure of the market town.

An inn offered more than drink. Travellers needed beds and horses required stabling, market visitors needed meals, and rooms were used for meetings, auctions and business. News arrived with travellers and carriers, and market-day business often continued inside the public houses after transactions in the street were finished.

A particularly interesting glimpse of older local custom appears in a nineteenth-century directory, which recorded that mourners in Rhayader had formerly carried small stones during funeral processions and deposited them at a particular point on the way to the church. The practice was associated with the phrase Carreg ar y ben, a stone upon the head. By the time the custom was recorded it had apparently fallen out of use, and its precise origin remains uncertain, but it preserves something of a Rhayader which otherwise survives poorly in official records.

St Clement’s Church has medieval origins, although the building seen today is principally the result of rebuilding between 1887 and 1897. Some earlier features were retained, including the old font and monuments. During eighteenth-century work at the church a number of human burials were uncovered. Later accounts identified them with men killed when Rhayader Castle was attacked in 1231, and stories developed around the discovery of an unusually large skeleton. The burials were real, but their connection with the medieval garrison cannot be demonstrated.

By the nineteenth century the Established Church shared Rhayader with a strong Nonconformist tradition. Congregationalists, Calvinistic Methodists, Baptists and Wesleyans all maintained congregations, serving people from the surrounding countryside as well as the town. Chapel Sunday brought another regular influx into Rhayader, much as market day did during the week.

Education also had roots extending beyond the familiar Victorian school buildings. Charitable endowments supported local teaching, while an endowed divinity lectureship had once connected Rhayader with the education of prospective clergy. The later Church of England Endowed School, built during the nineteenth century and subsequently enlarged, provided formal schooling for a substantial number of local children.

Poverty and resistance to the workhouse

One of the more revealing episodes in nineteenth-century Rhayader was the district’s response to the New Poor Law. Rhayader Poor Law Union was established in 1836 and brought together a number of surrounding parishes under the new system of poor relief. Central government expected unions to provide workhouses in which many of those seeking relief could be accommodated.

Rhayader resisted the proposal for decades.

A workhouse was authorised, but local objections delayed its construction for around forty years. The reasons reflected both the expense involved and a wider rural suspicion of a centralised system which seemed poorly suited to scattered communities where poverty had traditionally been dealt with at parish level.

Only in the late 1870s was a workhouse finally built on the Builth road. Designed by Stephen William Williams, it opened long after most unions elsewhere had already established similar institutions. Rhayader was among the very last places in England and Wales to provide a conventional workhouse under the principles introduced in 1834.

The history of the building did not end with the Poor Law. It later became Brynafon Public Assistance Institution and, during the Second World War, accommodated boys from the Royal Cambrian School for the Deaf who had been evacuated from Swansea. They remained there until the purpose-built school at Llandrindod Wells opened in 1950. The former workhouse therefore passed through several distinct periods of social history before later being adapted for other uses.

Stephen William Williams and Victorian Rhayader

Stephen William Williams is one of the figures who repeatedly appears in the story of Victorian Rhayader. An engineer, architect, archaeologist and antiquary, he settled in the town in the 1860s and served for many years as County Surveyor for Radnorshire.

His professional work included the Rhayader workhouse and involvement in the rebuilding of St Clement’s, alongside road, estate and property work elsewhere in the district. His surviving papers show the breadth of his interests. Engineering and architecture sat beside antiquarian research at a time when the study of Welsh archaeology was becoming more systematic. His archaeological work also extended to Abbey Cwmhir, where his investigations became closely associated with the search for the burial place of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd.

Williams is particularly relevant to Rhayader because his career coincided with a period of rapid change. Roads were improved, institutions rebuilt, the railway arrived and, towards the end of his life, Birmingham Corporation began acquiring land for the Elan Valley scheme. He belonged to a generation which altered the landscape while also becoming increasingly interested in recording its older buildings and archaeology.

The railway and early tourism

The opening of the Mid Wales Railway through Rhayader in 1864 changed the town’s relationship with the outside world. The station stood across the river at Cwmdeuddwr, but in practical terms it served Rhayader and drew the two communities even more closely together.

Farmers could send livestock farther afield, manufactured goods could arrive more easily, and journeys which had previously depended on slow road transport became considerably easier. The railway also encouraged visitors.

Rhayader had attracted travellers before the railway. Early nineteenth-century visitors wrote about the town, the river, the castle remains and the surrounding scenery, while local inns provided a base for exploring the countryside. Rail travel widened that market.

A particularly good example came in 1881 when more than one hundred members of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club visited Rhayader. Transport had to be arranged locally for the party, and residents gathered to watch their arrival. This was organised tourism before the Elan Valley reservoirs existed.

The later association between Rhayader and tourism was therefore not created by the dams. The reservoirs greatly enlarged and reshaped a visitor tradition which was already developing during the nineteenth century.

The Elan Valley works

The greatest single disruption to Victorian Rhayader came with Birmingham Corporation’s decision to obtain its water from the Elan and Claerwen valleys. Birmingham’s population had expanded dramatically, and the city needed a reliable supply of clean water. The rainfall and elevation of the Elan Valley made it possible to deliver water over a great distance largely by gravity.

Work began in the 1890s. Dams, reservoirs, tunnels and roads had to be constructed, together with a railway capable of carrying the enormous quantities of stone, machinery and other materials required for the scheme.

For Rhayader, the importance of the project was not merely that great engineering works were being built several miles away. Thousands of workers and their families came into a district whose existing population was relatively small.

The Elan Valley Railway joined the main railway close to Rhayader. A temporary settlement was created for the workforce with facilities including an accident hospital, reading room, mission room, canteen, recreation facilities, baths, post office and fire provision. For several years an industrial community existed beside a countryside which had previously been overwhelmingly agricultural.

Rhayader inevitably felt the consequences. Rooms and lodgings were needed, shops dealt with greater demand, public houses became busier and the roads and railway carried much heavier traffic. Local memory particularly associated Tanners Row with reservoir workers and preserved the nickname “Hell Fire Square”, apparently reflecting its Saturday-night reputation.

The workers were not simply anonymous labourers. In 1894 navvies employed on the scheme struck over rates of pay. Incidents such as this bring another dimension to the history of the reservoirs. The Elan Valley project was an engineering achievement, but it was also a place of work, wages, disputes, accidents and family life.

Population figures suggest something of the effect. Rhayader parish had fewer than eight hundred inhabitants in 1891, while the recorded population in 1901 was more than twelve hundred. Boundaries and census definitions need to be treated carefully, but contemporary observers themselves linked population growth in the district to the reservoir works.

The scheme was formally opened by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in July 1904, although construction continued afterwards. Once the main works were completed much of the temporary population moved away. Rhayader did not become an industrial settlement, but for more than a decade it had lived beside one of the largest civil-engineering projects in Britain.

Artillery on the hills

The railway brought other unexpected visitors. In September 1903 several trains arrived carrying more than four hundred Royal Artillery personnel, together with horses and heavy guns, for experimental exercises on the Cwmdeuddwr hills. Officers established their headquarters in Rhayader while the men camped nearby.

Further artillery exercises took place in the district before the First World War. The episode is easily overlooked, but it demonstrates how much communications had changed since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Rhayader could now receive hundreds of soldiers, horses and heavy equipment by rail in a matter of hours.

War, local government and the twentieth century

The First World War affected Rhayader and the surrounding parishes deeply. When the old Market Hall was demolished in 1924 its site became the location of the memorial clock, carrying the names of men from Rhayader and neighbouring communities who had died. Names from the Second World War were later added.

The memorial served a district rather than simply the town, which was characteristic of Rhayader’s wider role. The same was true of local government. Rhayader became the headquarters of Rhayader Rural District Council, administering a broad rural area until the reorganisation of local government in 1974.

Agriculture meanwhile remained central to the town. Livestock markets continued through the twentieth century, maintaining an activity whose origins reached back into the medieval borough.

The closure of the Mid Wales railway at the end of 1962 removed the passenger and goods connection which had served the district for almost a century. Road transport once again became dominant, but by then the reasons people travelled to Rhayader were changing.

The Elan Valley reservoirs, built to solve Birmingham’s water problem, had acquired another identity. The dams and the landscape around them drew visitors interested in scenery, walking, cycling and industrial history. Rhayader increasingly became the natural gateway to the valley.

The transition was gradual rather than sudden. Agriculture did not disappear, nor did the town simply reinvent itself as a tourist centre. Inns which had once served farmers, commercial travellers and railway passengers increasingly welcomed motorists and walkers, while shops served both residents and visitors.

The old market relationship also survived. Livestock sales still take place in Rhayader. More than six centuries after medieval records first reveal the town’s market functions, animals continue to be brought here for sale. The means of transport and methods of trading have changed, but the connection between Rhayader and the farming countryside around it remains.

Rhayader and the upper Wye

Looking across Rhayader’s history, the importance of its position is difficult to escape. The town developed beside a crossing of the Wye and continued to prosper because people needed to pass through it or come into it.

The medieval castle belonged to that crossing. The borough and market drew people from a scattered agricultural hinterland. Roads brought coaches, carriers and livestock, while the tolls placed upon those roads helped produce unrest. Mills and the tannery used the resources of the surrounding countryside. The railway brought Rhayader into direct contact with the wider economy, and later made possible the enormous movement of people and materials required for the Elan Valley works.

The town changed repeatedly, but it did not lose every trace of its earlier forms. Old buildings remain among the later streets, the bridge still carries traffic across the Wye, and the relationship between Rhayader and Cwmdeuddwr remains visible on either side of the river. The railway has disappeared, although its course can still be followed, while the reservoirs have become a permanent part of the landscape west of the town.

For most of its history Rhayader’s importance lay not in the number of people who lived within it, but in the number of people who depended upon it. Farmers came here to trade, labourers came to find work, families came to worship, travellers stopped at its inns, and surrounding communities used its institutions and services.

That remains perhaps the best way to understand Rhayader. It was, and in many respects remains, the meeting place of the upper Wye.

Sources and Further Reading

The principal archaeological overview for the development of Rhayader is the historic settlement study prepared by the former Clwyd-Powys Archaeological Trust, now Heneb. Its Rhayader historic settlement report brings together the evidence for the river crossing, possible castle sites, medieval borough, burgage plots, street development, bridge, mills and later growth. The Coflein record for Rhayader provides further archaeological and topographical context.

For the religious history of the town, the Heneb historic church survey for St Clement’s is particularly useful for the medieval church, rebuilding of 1887–97 and surviving earlier features. The history of Rhayader’s traditional leather industry is preserved by Amgueddfa Cymru’s account of the Rhayader tannery, now reconstructed at St Fagans.

The long local resistance to the New Poor Law and the eventual construction of the Rhayader workhouse can be followed through The Workhouse. Powys Archives preserves the records of the Rhayader Board of Guardians, including material from the period in which the union repeatedly delayed building a workhouse.

Stephen William Williams is documented extensively in the Penralley Papers at the National Library of Wales. His papers illuminate his work as County Surveyor, architect, engineer, antiquary and estate agent, as well as the wider development of Victorian Rhayader.

For the railway era, see the Radnorshire Society’s history of the Mid Wales Railway. The history of the Elan Valley scheme, its workers, engineering and later landscape is preserved by the Elan Valley Trust. Contemporary newspapers, directories, census returns and later local histories provide much of the social detail used here, including markets, inns, funeral customs, railway visitors, reservoir workers and military activity around Cwmdeuddwr.

Read alongside the history of New Radnor, the history of Presteigne and the civic history of Llandrindod Wells, Rhayader forms another part of the wider story of how power, commerce, transport and community life shifted across Radnorshire over time.