Category: Welsh History & Heritage
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The Waters That Built a Town: How the Mineral Springs Created Llandrindod Wells
There are towns whose origins can still be read quite easily in the landscape. Some grew beneath castles, others around markets, ports, mines or factories. Llandrindod Wells is…
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Mary Anne Wilkins Lucas, Later Middleton Evans: The Woman Who Helped Give Llandrindod Wells Its Hospital
Old photographs have a habit of preserving a face while allowing almost everything around it to disappear. A sitter who once belonged to a family, a household and…
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Tom Norton of Llandrindod Wells: The Man Behind the Automobile Palace
There are some people whose lives become so closely woven into the story of a place that it becomes difficult to separate one from the other. In Llandrindod…
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Doldowlod Hall: Industry, Landscape and the Making of a Radnorshire Estate
There are country houses which dominate their surroundings and others which seem to belong to them. Doldowlod is one of the latter. Travelling south from Rhayader along the…
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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…
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The Rock Park Hotel, Llandrindod Wells: Two Centuries of Reinvention
On 10 October 1865, the railway finally reached Llandrindod Wells. A special train brought visitors into a place which was still more common and countryside than town. Despite…
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The Pump House Hotel, Llandrindod Wells: The Building That Made the Victorian Spa
Some hotels belong to the history of a town. The Pump House belonged to the reason the town existed at all. Long before Llandrindod Wells acquired its railway…
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The Gwalia Hotel, Llandrindod Wells: Its People and Afterlife
Some buildings sit quietly in the landscape, fixed to the moment that produced them. The Gwalia never behaved like that. It moved from one world into another, carrying…
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Ye Wells, Llandrindod Wells: The Many Lives of a Spa Landmark
Ye Wells has been part of Llandrindod Wells for so long that people barely look at it now. It sits there on Spa Road East, huge and red‑brick…
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When an English City Drowned a Welsh Village: Llanwddyn and the Making of Lake Vyrnwy
During the hot summer of 2018, falling water levels at Lake Vyrnwy exposed fragments of an earlier landscape. Masonry appeared along the reservoir’s margins. Old foundations and parts…