WALES

BUILTH WELLS and NEARBY TOWNS

SEPTEMBER 2018

Here is another copy of the marked-up map of Wales showing the relative location of Hay, Builth Wells and other nearby places. Unfortunately I made a fatal mistake when processing photographs of my time here so I cannot illustrate this post in the way I would wish.

Builth

is another old town built near a ford across the Wye only 20 miles upriver from Hay.

It too was a strategic site and here Edward I built a castle that in this case had earthworks rather than stone walls. In 1282 Prince Llewellyn was denied refuge in it as he fled Norman forces who killed him nearby – making it a place of commemoration visited by many Welsh people on the anniversary of his death.

The town was militarily and economically important for a long time due to its position at the junction between major east-west and north-south routes, with cattle rearing of animals that were later named after the nearest large market – Hereford - being one of the most important activities.

In due course and with the coming of the Railways in the 19^th Century the town was developed as a Spa by the Victorians and the word Wells added to its name.

The town's agricultural roots are no doubt one of the reasons it is also chosen each year as the site for the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show. 

About 5 miles farther on along a minor road to the north east a farming family have decided that these days providing facilities for tents and caravans will probably pay more than rearing cattle.

Fforest Fields Campsite is large, spacious and well-equipped and is set in very peaceful countryside yet with good access to nearby towns – particularly Builth and Llandrindod Wells. The family are all very helpful and friendly making it very popular amongst campers visiting Mid-Wales, though in late September it wasn't at all crowded.

I find it hard to decide if the spelling of the site name is a bit of daft political correctness or a fitting acknowledgement of a real cultural difference between the English and the Welsh.

Apparently, in the Welsh language a single letter 'f' has a hard pronunciation and a second 'f' is added to soften it when necessary. To produce the welsh sound the English would have to spell the name as 'Forest Vields'.

Another example I came across later during this expedition is that the town I always used to know as 'Caernarvon' is now spelt 'Caernarfon' on all official publications such as waysigns, maps, weather forecasts and so on – its still pronounced the same way though. 

Llandrindod Wells

lying just 10 miles north of Builth and 5 across a range of hills from Fforest Fields was another rural community that experienced a major expansion in the 19^thCentury with the coming of the railway. Here too entrepreneurs built Hotels, houses and places of entertainment attracting city-dwellers to visit the countryside and 'Take the Waters' in this 'Healthy Spa Town'. The town has experienced a new lease of life in the last few years with an influx of Local Government Employees as it has become the administrative centre for Powys County Council.

Rhayader

lies just ten miles northwest of Llandrindod and also on the river Wye only 20 miles from its source on Plynlimon mountain. 

The surrounding area has been occupied by humans for thousands of years and though no written record earlier than the 12^thcentury has been found, Bronze Age Burial sites and Roman Jewellery have been discovered. Some of the latter – the Rhayader Hoard – is displayed in the British Museum.

Rhayader came to national prominence in the 19^thCentury for two principal reasons.

The first was around 1840 when protests against excessive Tolls on Turnpikes (the motorways of their day) turned into the 'Rebecca Riots”. These were so named because many local farmers and agricultural workers, dressed up as women, attacked and destroyed no fewer than six of Rhayader's tollgates without being caught and punished. Of course the authorities reacted by increasing military forces in the region but they also removed most of the grievances by changing the laws on Tolls.

The second change was even more profound with consequences that last to the present day.

This arose because of the rapid and uncontrolled expansion of cities during the Industrial Revolution of the early – mid 19^thCentury. This resulted in death and incapacity for thousands from Typhoid, Cholera, Dysentery and other diseases that thrived and multiplied in the crowded and insanitary conditions prevailing before development of water supply and sewage drainage systems for which the Victorians are justly renowned. 

Birmingham, just 80 miles east of Rhayader, was affected particularly severely by these problems since it was at the heart of the new Manufacturing Industries. The City Council successfully petitioned the Government of the day to pass an Act permitting the city to acquire by compulsory purchase all the land in the water-catchment area of the Eland Valleys just a few miles from Rhayader.

Birmingham's Civic Water Department's Engineers conceived a design comprising five huge dams and a viaduct from the Elan Valley to Birmingham requiring the employment, housing and feeding of thousands of navvies . Four of the dams were completed by 1900 and the viaduct by 1906 though the fifth took until 1952 and was opened by our present Queen soon after she assumed the throne.

The viaduct is notable because water travels the entire distance under gravity taking 2 ½ – 3 days to flow from one end to the other (Pooh sticks anyone?).

Elan Valley Trust

was established in 1989 to conserve the rights established by compulsory purchase of the estate so they would not be eroded by Privatisation of the Water Supply Industry. 

The Elan Valley website describes the Trust's objectives and has many links to interesting information and photographs that sadly I have to rely upon as I inadvertently destroyed my own.

My Cycle Rides

There are many walking and cycle trails in the Trust's lands but first I explored by car.

In truth, the first half was fascinating but the second rather tedious. My route took me from Fforest Fields over the unfenced hilltops to Llandridnod Wells and thence to Rhayder and the Elan Visitor Centre at the bottom of the valley. 

The lower reservoirs were half empty but water was pouring over the highest dam after the recent rains – 'sob', 'sob', photos lost - as I continued up and over the mountain road past the headwaters of the Wye and Severn rivers on Plynlimon, down the western slopes, and south again via minor roads and a small town called Tregaron until I could finally reach Llandovery (Grandpa's Cycle Rides) and turn north west again for Builth Wells. 

But I did go back to enjoy two days when I finally got to ride a total of about 8 miles in both directions.

To illustrate those rides I can display this map showing the route of the railway originally constructed in the 1890s to convey men and materials from the specially constructed Elan Village for workers to the site of the highest dam. 

 

Nowadays that railway line has been converted into a trail for walkers and cyclists. But it has to be said there's a fairly demanding gradient in some places so I don't regret splitting the total into two expeditions.

WALES

HAY-ON-WYE

SEPTEMBER 2018

Hay is an old market town about half way along the river Wye between its source on Plynlimon mountain in central Wales and its confluence with the River Severn at Chepstow. 

The Severn also rises on Plynlimon but takes a more leisurely course through English lowlands to the start of its estuary, with Chepstow on the right bank and the small village of Aust on the left between Bristol and Gloucester.

It is likely Hay was first put on the map as early as 1070 when William Fitz Osbern, a cousin of William the Conqueror, was ennobled to become the first Earl of Hereford and built a castle there to aid his campaign against the Welsh.

Fighting between the Normans and the Welsh continued sporadically for the next 300 years until the Glendower rebellion (the Welsh called it the War of Independence) in the early fifteenth century. 

In the first five years Glendower drove back the English until he controlled most of Wales and the adjacent English counties.    He formed an alliance with the French in the hope of further success but they were more concerned with events on the continent and Glendower himself lacked a navy and, critically, canon with which to overcome and capture castles. 

The English King, Henry IV, was accomplished in pitched battles but unused to the guerilla tactics of the Welsh. 

His son gained command around 1405 and gradually turned the course of events by using the numerous castles still in English hands as bases from which to attack the Welsh in the field and to deny them supplies.

These tactics succeeded and Prince Henry recaptured territory and castles previously lost to the Welsh.     By 1410 the tide had turned completely and although Glendower was never captured he disappeared in 1412. 

A year later the old king died and the Prince became King Henry V. He brought an end to most of the fighting by offering a general pardon to all who surrendered (except for Glendower himself and his committed followers the Tudors).

That left Henry free to pursue the Hundred Years War in France during which he gained his famous victory at Agincourt in 1415, commemorated in  Michael Drayton's (1563 - 1631) famous ballad starting with the lines -  

Fair stood the wind for France,

When we our sails advance,

Although Glendower's rebellion was defeated there is no doubt his defiance stimulated a sense of National Identity in the Welsh that continues to the present day. 

That is why road signs in Hay are displayed in both Welsh and English even though it is only just within the national boundary and 20 miles from Hereford, a quintessential English city.

The wars of the Roses started 40 years after Glendower's rebellion but their origin lay a few years before in a fight for succession between descendants of King Edward III's four eldest sons.    

When they ended, all male descendants in a direct line had either died naturally or been killed - it was a distant cousin of the Lancastrian's, Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII and achieved reconciliation of a sort by marrying Elizabeth of York. 

Prominent along the Borders were members of the Mortimer family, ennobled as the Earls of March, who were local rulers of the English-Welsh borderlands south of Shropshire and deeply involved in both the Glendower rebellion and the wars of the Roses in the second half of the 15th Century. 

I've found no record of specific incidents in or near Hay during either conflict but think the inhabitants must have been severely affected as they were so close to the Mortimer heartlands. 

Its similarly hard to believe Hay's inhabitants escaped involvement 200 years later during the English Civil Wars.    Shropshire, Hereford and most of Wales were Royalist and Gloucester Parliamentarian.        Hay, along with other border towns must have suffered as the fighting ebbed and flowed, if only as the armies foraged for food and recruits.

It was after these turbulent times that Hay became a quiet market town - no doubt to the relief of the inhabitants - but in 1962 a Welsh collector and vendor of specialist and second-hand books named Richard Booth set up shop in Hay and encouraged others to do the same. 

Many others had opened similar shops by the late 1970s and in 1988 Peter Florence, who made his living by organising Arts Festivals of various types, financed the first Hay Literary Festival that has been held every year since, in late May and early June.

I attended in June 2016 whilst staying in Hereford and an account of my visit is included in a blog entry posted in February 2017.

This year I decided to revisit the town and browse one or two bookshops in the off-season. I stayed at two sites, one quite near town south of the river and one up in the hills on the opposite side of the valley.       I preferred the second because it was less open and with fewer visitors at this time of year.

I did browse the shelves and bought a couple of books – a young writer's fictional story about life in the San Blas Islands, interesting to me because of my own cruise there in Alchemi (Grandpa's Voyages March 2014 Post) – and a biography of EM Forster bought on the spur of the moment because I found he had lived with his mother at Tunbridge Wells and concluded that English Suburban Life was pretty repulsive. 

But I also found standing in narrow aisles between shelves with hundreds and hundreds of books lost its appeal after a bit so I also toured locally by car on one or two days and soon moved on. 

GLOUCESTER

SEPTEMBER 2018

Constrained by the need to be in Tunbridge Wells at the end of October (to provide access to my flat during external redecoration), this year I had to forgo an autumnal search for the sun in Europe.

Instead I decided to visit Wales again and to travel there in easy stages from the caravan storage farm near Winchester.

I stayed first at a basic campsite near the small village of Slad, high in the Cotswold Hills on the escarpment overlooking Gloucester and Cheltenham. This was a single field in which I was the sole occupant for the first 24 hours, and had all essential services (including a power supply) but no showers. 

One of the reasons for choosing this place was to visit an annual History Festival in Gloucester. For the most part that was a disappointment due to congestion in the city centre that was once a beautiful place – when the population was about 5 % of its present number. 

Cathedral Design and Construction

But one of the events was a talk on Cathedral Green by a young stone-mason being trained and employed by the Cathedral as one of its small team maintaining the fabric of the building. His talk and demonstration of traditional tools was very interesting and I was surprised to learn most of the work was performed with an axe - chisels and claws being employed only for fine work and decorative carving. 

I very much enjoyed the discussion that followed, leading as it did to confirmation critical decisions on the design and construction were originally taken by a Master Builder and a Master Carpenter. Both reached their positions after a long apprenticeship and many years experience in their trades. 

I also learned the Master Carpenter became less important as time passed because there were so many roof fires that timber vaults and construction were replaced in stone and flying buttresses developed to carry the greater weight and outward thrusts resulting from this change – all done empirically since the mathematics and physics of science and engineering were not developed until centuries later. 

The young mason confirmed many problems and accidents arose from this empirical approach because, knowledgeable and skilled though they were, contemporary masons couldn't foresee all possibilities. 

Perhaps the most famous example is the free-standing Bell Tower of Pisa Cathedral in Italy and it is less well known that the central tower in Wells Cathedral suffered a similar problem in the same period (14^thCentury). 

In both cases the problem stemmed from the underlying ground being unable uniformly to support the weight of the towers. At Pisa it was softness of the ground on one side that caused the inclination observed during initial construction and prevalent ever since. The central tower at Wells was first discovered to be leaning about a hundred years after construction and is now thought to have been caused by a fault generated during an earthquake a hundred years before that. 

Many unsuccessful stabilisation measures have been tried at Pisa but the latest series, starting as recently as 1964, seem to have led to a successful result in 2008! 

Medieval masons were more successful at Wells and the strong but elegant“Scissors Arches”were introduced in the first half of the 14^thCentury. 

Gloucester Cathedral Construction and Use

Christianity had been established in England for many years before the Norman invasion and an abbey built in Gloucester in the late 7^thCentury. At that time it was secondary in importance to one already established at Hereford that originated, along with one at Worcester, as a sub-division of the Bishopric of Lichfield. These latter places were at the heart of the Kingdom of Mercia, established after the Saxons had pushed the Britons into Wales but later over-run by the Viking invaders from Scandinavia and then the Normans.

The Normans quickly changed everything they found and immediately after their victory at Hastings in 1066 imparted a new vigour to both civil and religious life with a massive programme of Castle and Cathedral building unlike anything seen before in strength and size.

In the Midlands they started at Hereford in 1079 to replace an Abbey destroyed by the Welsh under Prince Llewellyn, and the Norman Bishop of Hereford started construction of another new Abbey at Gloucester ten years later in 1089.

A 7^thcentury Saxon church had previously stood on the site chosen but the new building was stone-built as a great place of Worship that would completely overawe the local population.

In common with many other Norman buildings the Abbey was largely completed in the 13^thcentury but extensively expanded and modifed over the next 100-200 years. It had many Royal associations, with Henry III being initially crowned there in 1216, Edward III buried in 1327, and Henry VIII destroying its ownership during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1520 but re-instating it as a Cathedral one year later.

Today, it continues as an active place of worship and a magnificent reminder of past glories.

In these less devout days it is also used for more secular purposes such as film-making. My grandchildren may be interested to learn it appeared as Hogwarts School in several of the Harry Potter films and my daughter that it was the setting for Wolf Hall in the BBC's adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novel of the same name.