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More About Hotels in Mid Wales

This is the quiet north of Mid Wales, where the rivers are gathered into reservoirs and the woods are full of birds. The lanes out to Llanfyllin and the lake see more tractors than tourists, and the last few miles are single track with passing places.

It suits a slower kind of break. Powis Castle and the Montgomery Canal are both within ten minutes of Welshpool, and Lake Vyrnwy about forty minutes north-west, which makes the market town the obvious middle of it. Nobody hurries up here, and after a day or two neither will you.

In the eighteen-eighties Liverpool needed a bigger supply for its taps, and it came looking in the Welsh hills. Engineers dammed the Vyrnwy valley north-west of Welshpool to make a great reservoir, and it took most of the decade to build.

There was a village in the valley: Llanwddyn, with its church, its two chapels and its street of houses. All of it was taken down and the reservoir rose over the old streets. A new Llanwddyn was built lower down and the people were moved into it.

The dam was the first large stone dam built in Britain. It was finished in 1888 and the first supply reached Liverpool in 1892, running nearly seventy miles by aqueduct and tunnel on gravity alone, without a single pump.

At the lake’s edge stands a tall stone tower with a pointed roof, like something off a fairy-tale castle. It draws the supply into that aqueduct, and on a still morning it stands upside down in the lake below it.

You can drive right round the lake now, a loop of about twelve miles through the trees. People still live in the new village below the dam, and there is a shop there and a car park at Coed y Capel with a cafe beside it.

The RSPB looks after the lake and thousands of acres of moor and oak wood above it, and the Coed y Capel hide takes a wheelchair. Look for dippers nesting by the rocky streams, and for pied flycatchers and redstarts in the woods each spring.

You can hire a bike at the lake through the summer or take a boat out on it. Or walk a stretch of the five-mile shore and turn back when you have had enough, which is what most people end up doing.

Beyond the lake, Welshpool and Montgomery make handsome market-town bases. Powis Castle and its terraces sit ten minutes from the first and the border runs a few fields past the second. You can be in the open Cambrian hills within the hour.