Overview - location and history.

This rural market town in north-west Powys, with a current population just topping 2,000, grew on the edge of the Afon Dyfi flood-plain, part-way between the river's tumbling upland source above Llanymawddwy and its sand-barred estuary at Aberdyfi. Permission by charter for a weekly Wednesday market (still flourishing today!) was granted in 1291 by the English king, Edward I, to Owen de la Pole and heirs, formalising Machynlleth's status as trading centre of an area that reflects much of the physical catchment of the Dyfi. Nowadays healthily bilingual, the town is famous for rebellious Welsh leader Owain Glyndwr's crowning as prince of a secessionist Wales in 1404 and for his reputed holding of a parliament here.

Some ten miles from the sea at Machynlleth is the most downstream road crossing of the Dyfi - replacing earlier structures, this stone bridge was built in 1805, its cost shared between the old counties of Sir Maldwyn (Montgomeryshire) and Meirionydd (Merioneth) that it connected. It's been awkward for modern traffic and patched with iron reinforcements, but the Dyfi when in high spate is a stirring sight as it crowds the arches. A new bridge is now complete a little upstream, a major work to mitigate flooding issues between the old bridge and the town.

Farming and industry.

A foundation of the district was the farming of hill and valley with hardy native breeds of cattle and sheep. Stock-rearing is still important, but farming faces ever-new economic challenges as market and government influence its structure. Forestry with mixed conifers (mainly Sitka spruce) has clothed many hills, whilst mining for metal ores and slate has declined. Tourism is of increased significance. Services and shops employ many.

Local iron smelting once used coppiced oak woodland as a renewable fuel resource, and there was a trade in tanbark both locally and exported from the district into more recent times. People spun the native wool and wove woollen cloth. Vessels of shallow draft could reach upriver to within 2½m. or so of Machynlleth, and slate and lead from the hinterland were exported by that route.

The expansion of slate mining in the 1800's built villages like Corris, where there's a narrow gauge railway museum.

In 1863 the main line railway came, linking Machynlleth to the national network and, as a distributor of products of the new industrial age, radically changing the availability of goods and produce and thus modifying local employment.

As industries declined there was a measure of depopulation.

The built environment.

The walls of many older buildings in Machynlleth are of local rubble mudstone, using copious amounts of lime mortar to bed the thin, irregular stones, but this construction is often disguised by applied façades towards the street.

Roofing slates were originally fixed by an oak peg through the head of each, later by nails, and lime mortar 'torching' applied to their undersides helped them to adhere and stopped draughts and driven snow.

Local timber was used and also re-used - timbers are sometimes seen pierced with mortices and borings irrelevant to current functioning - but its availability declined with time and it was supplanted by imported softwoods.

Buildings are often altered during their lives so that what we see of them, as of the countryside itself, is a historical palimpsest. Quirky details often arise from supercessions and superimpositions of different building purposes and periods. Shop fronts may be grafted on to the ground floors of buildings that began life just as houses. Buildings may come to be divided up internally in ways that create oddities of external appearance. If you walk through the town, see if you can spot some

After the walls, much of a building's structural interest is in how it supports its roof between the gables, but this is usually concealed from the passer by. Much of the remaining interest lies in the detailing - of the masonry, render, carpentry and joinery, and all their furnishings and decoration.

Vertically-sliding sash window construction, copied from the Low Countries, became more common after about 1700, usually weight-balanced. Whilst being no more draught-proof than the hinged casement windows of the time, they tend to have an elegance derived from their proportions and from the way the sashes open for ventilation within the plane of the building's elevation.

Conformism and non-conformism - and a place for the arts.

St. Peter's in 1808 was "a handsome, cruciform medieval church with rood screen and carved stalls", but re-building and renovation happened in 1827 and 1843. After some initial hostilty, nonconformism began to take hold. Various outlying villages had not just their own church, but chapels of rival denominations as well.

The Tabernacle is a skilfully-renovated neo-classical Methodist chapel of 1880, that together with adjacent buildings is now home to the Museum of Modern Art Wales. The chapel itself acts as performance space, with pews kept as seating, and here the excellent annual Festival is centred.

Modern Machynlleth - between past and future.

Architecturally, the Sixties often coupled a grasping at the modern with an insensitivity to history, but were perhaps no more brutal in this way than any other age. Consider for example the building now occupied by the Job Centre (image 23), in the context of the earlier buildings of Maengwyn Street.

Even more recent buildings have arisen that from whatever intentions (and they are normally commercial at root) represent not genuine good design but humbug and pastiche - appearing neither truly period nor truly modern. But such things scrape past the planners somehow, and their presence and destiny is non-inspirational.

But we have also gained more exploratory buildings that might be seen as genuinely contemporary.

I first wrote this page for Cymdeithas Dinesig Machynlleth A’r Cylch / Machynlleth And District Civic Society - a voluntary non-profit body concerned with local heritage. It's remit was to promote high standards of local planning and architecture, and to encourage public interest in the geography, history and architecture of the area - also to encourage the preservation, protection, development and improvement of features of historic / public interest locally. It now seems to be defunct, but I'm keeping the page aloft.