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More About Holiday Cottages in Newtown

Just outside Tregynon the lane runs into seven hundred and fifty acres of parkland at Gregynog. It is open to anybody, every day, from eight in the morning until eight at night through the summer. There is no charge to walk in.

Newtown itself is fifteen minutes south, with the shops and the railway station. Llanllwchaiarn is across the bridge on the north bank. In between there is not a great deal except farms and river meadow, with the Severn looping through the fields the whole way down.

Gregynog looks like a black-and-white timbered house and it is nothing of the kind. Charles Hanbury-Tracy, Lord Sudeley, rebuilt it in the 1840s and had the timbering moulded in concrete and painted on. It is among the earliest uses of concrete in a British building.

In 1920 it was bought by two sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who wanted somewhere in Wales for artists, craftsmen and musicians to work. They started the Gregynog Festival there in 1933, and it still runs.

They also set up the Gregynog Press, which printed hand-made books in small numbers and is still going under the Welsh name Gwasg Gregynog. That press is the reason a village of this size turns up in histories of British book printing.

The sisters spent their money on paintings, and what they gathered before 1920 was one of the most important British collections of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist work. They gave the lot away. It hangs in the Davies Galleries at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff.

Seven hundred and fifty acres is a great deal of ground, with formal gardens, a lake and woodland walks. The gardens are listed Grade I, which is the top grade there is.

Parts of the garden go back a long way before the house in front of them, and the rhododendrons in spring are the thing most people come for. The café by the hall opens seven days a week, ten until four. Parking is pay and display.

Tregynon is the village at the gate, and the lanes around it are the sort you meet nothing on. Bettws Cedewain and Manafon are two more villages along the same lanes. It is six miles back to Newtown, which takes about fifteen minutes because none of the road is straight.

Newtown gives you the shops, the station and Theatr Hafren, and Oriel Davies at the edge of the park costs nothing to look round. The Severn has a path along it through the middle of town. Most people use the town for supplies and the lanes for everything else.