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Go up to the Elan Valley and drive the road past its four dams, finished in 1904 to supply Birmingham through a pipeline seventy-three miles long. Then get to Gigrin Farm outside Rhayader for the red kite feed, which is three o'clock through the summer and an hour earlier in winter. Hundreds come in off the hills at once.

It is a long way from everywhere and that is the appeal. The towns of the high middle are Machynlleth, Rhayader, Builth Wells and Llandrindod. Welshpool and Newtown sit over towards the English border, and a great deal of hill lies between the lot of them, so a car makes life easier.

The red kite was once one of the commonest birds in Britain. Then it was reclassified as vermin, and people shot it, trapped it and took its eggs until there was very nearly nothing left of it at all.

What was left was here in Powys. By the early 1900s the whole British population had been squeezed down to a handful of breeding pairs, hanging on in the hills and hidden valleys. Genetic work long afterwards traced those survivors, in effect, to a single female line.

Protection began in 1903, and the recovery was agonising. The birds did not pass twenty pairs until the 1960s. By the early 1980s there were still only about fifty, every last one in this corner of the country. The ground they had been driven into was hard going for a kite in the first place.

Then it worked. From 1989 young birds were taken from nests here, and in Sweden and Spain, and released in the Chilterns and on the Black Isle. The kite went back out across Britain. The ones you see over English motorways now are the result.

And here they still are. At Gigrin Farm outside Rhayader the meat goes out at three o'clock in summer and two in winter, and hundreds of wild kites drop in for it. They are not tame and it is not a display. They have worked out the timetable.

Gigrin shuts on Thursdays and Fridays in term time, so you can save yourself a wasted drive by checking the day first. Adult entry is £12 in 2026 and a child is £7.50, and the photography hides are booked ahead in the busy weeks.

The rest of Powys is some of the emptiest country in Wales, and you can drive half an hour between towns. The Cambrian Mountains run down the middle, the four Elan dams sit in the hills above Rhayader, and Plynlimon tops out at 2,467 feet.

There is something on most months. Builth Wells still sells sheep every Friday and the Royal Welsh Show fills its showground for four days each July. Llandrindod Wells dresses Victorian for a week at the end of August.

Look up while you are here. The kites over these hills today are the ones that never left.