Welshpool Accommodation

More About Welshpool

Give half a day to Powis Castle, whose terraced gardens are worth the ticket on their own. Ride the narrow-gauge Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway eight miles up the Banwy valley to Llanfair Caereinion, checking the timetable first, and walk the canal through the middle of town.

Dogs and muddy boots raise no eyebrows here and there is usually somewhere to park. The main road and the Cambrian railway line make Welshpool an easy first or last stop in Wales, with Shrewsbury half an hour east if the weather turns.

Powis Castle was begun around 1252 by Gruffudd ap Gwenwynwyn, a Welsh prince of Powys. The Herbert family bought it in 1587 and spent three centuries turning a fortress into a home, and its red stone still shows for miles.

They hung the hillside below it with terraces and enormous clipped yews. The garden dates from the late 1600s and is one of very few Baroque terraced gardens left in Britain, which is why gardeners come a long way to see it.

Inside, the Clive Museum holds more than a thousand pieces from South and East Asia, made between about 1600 and the 1830s. It is the largest collection of its kind in Britain outside a public museum, brought back by Robert Clive and his son Edward.

The town below made its living from wool and the weekly market, and later from the canal and the railway. The little line to Llanfair Caereinion opened in 1903 to carry sheep and coal, lost its passengers in 1931, and was brought back by volunteers from 1963.

Give Powis half a day now that the National Trust runs it. An hour on the terraces, a couple of hours in the castle and the Clive Museum, then the deer park and the tea room.

Steam runs up the Banwy valley to Llanfair Caereinion through the season, eight miles and the best part of an hour each way. It does not run every day of the week, so look at the timetable before you plan around it.

The stalls still fill the top of Broad Street on a Monday, and the livestock market sits on the edge of town. The canal towpath is flat and dead easy walking, north towards Pool Quay or south towards Berriew.

The Montgomery Canal itself runs thirty-three miles, from the Shropshire border near Ellesmere down to Newtown, coming right through the middle of Welshpool. The English border sits a few fields east, Montgomery and its castle ruin fifteen minutes south, and Lake Vyrnwy about forty minutes north-west.