The busy, friendly market town of Rhayader offers an eastern gateway to the Cambrian Mountains. Well served by a range of shops, pubs, hotels and cafés, the town lies within a sublime landscape which unfolds into hills and moorland from the basin of the Wye Valley. The high land to the west is increasingly and happily being referred to by its ancient name, Elenydd, and is one of the loneliest and wildest spaces south of the Scottish border. The region’s open landscape may appear to be in its wild state, but man’s impact upon it has been long term and draconian. Large areas would have once been covered with dwarf oak woodlands, the delightful remnants of which are encountered on some of the walks in this book, and the monuments of early settlers still adorn the plateau, adding a powerful historical resonance to our modern wanderings. In subsequent millennia, mankind has continued to play a decisive role in the development of the landscape, chiefly through sheep farming. The Cistercian monks profitably managed sheepwalks in the medieval period, and a section of their ancient road between the abbeys of Cwm Hir and Strata Florida provides one of the most striking routes in this book. Industry has long been a part of man's relationship with this land, and the story of metal mining is etched into the hills. The mining industry was in terminal decline by the late nineteenth century, when the Corporation of Birmingham was beginning work on one of the defining features of the modern mid-Wales landscape, the Elan Valley dams. Construction stole away thousands of acres of the Welsh countryside as well as several hundred livelihoods, an evil not outweighed by the free access allowed to this new found wilderness. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the past, the Gothic architecture of the dams and their attendant reservoirs add a powerful theme to walks in the Elan Valley.
