Llanhamlach

The Old Ford and a tiny village

The garden at the Old Ford Inn looks south-west towards the Beacons, and one recent visitor decided it "has to top the ratings for best view from a pub garden in the UK." The inn stands on the A40 with a real fire, a separate bar and a copper-worked central servery hung with a collection of nip bottles. The food is homemade: sandwiches, baguettes, jacket potatoes and salads at lunch; in the evening a pie of the day, fish, and, recent diners report, a house dish called the Llanhamlach chicken in a garlic and mushroom sauce. Sunday lunch comes with three meats, seasonal vegetables, potatoes and homemade gravy, and recent diners have mentioned cheesecake, apple pie, and jam sponge and custard. The place was once a stop for drovers walking cattle to English markets, and its ford crossed the Usk to Pencelli until the river grew too deep to wade.

Llanhamlach is sixteen houses and about sixty people, strung along the trunk road and the river five kilometres south-east of Brecon. There is no shop. What it has instead is a Georgian country house and a church with an unusually old carving.

Peterstone Court and the parish church

Peterstone Court is the country house, a Grade II* mansion built in 1741 for a barrister named John Powell and later part of the Glanusk estate. It replaced an older house of the Walbeoffe family, who between 1627 and 1707 gave the county four High Sheriffs. Today it is a hotel with a restaurant and bar; the kitchen describes its own cooking as tasty, unpretentious food, and dogs are welcome. The setting is relaxed despite the grand approach.

The Church of St Peter and St Illtyd keeps the stranger things. Its Moridic Stone, cut in the tenth or eleventh century, carries a cross and two crude figures with their hands raised, and an inscription running along the edge. For a time it did duty as a window lintel in the old rectory, and it was pulled out of the ruins after 1852. Nearby lies a fine fourteenth-century effigy of a woman, her feet resting on a dog; a later inscription names her Jane Walbeoffe, though the pedigree behind that name is doubtful. Look also for the octagonal font, the seventeenth-century grave slabs set in the porch, and the painted angels in the chancel, which replaced earlier ones lost to damp. The nave and chancel were rebuilt in 1887 by S. W. Williams of Rhayader.

From the church to the river

From the church car park a footpath drops down to the River Usk. On the hill above the village is Tŷ Illtyd, a Neolithic chambered tomb, and the wider country offers the riverside Usk Valley Walk and the Brecon Promenade, a short surfaced stretch where you might see kingfishers or goosander below the seven-arched Llanfaes Bridge.

Getting to Llanhamlach

Getting here is simplest by road, since the A40 runs straight through. The practical railhead is Abergavenny, about seventeen miles off, and the X43 bus between Brecon and Abergavenny stops on the main road at Llanhamlach, near Tŷ-Illtyd, though not every service calls.

The stone woman and her dog

Stand in the churchyard at the end of the afternoon and the stone woman is still there with her dog under her feet, waiting out the centuries.