Llanigon

Bell chamber and brookside settlement

St Eigon's Church keeps its bells in an unusual place. Rather than a tower, three bells hang in a chamber built directly above the south porch, probably dating from 1670; two of the bells are cast from that year, the third from 1904. Step into that porch and you pass a thirteenth-century font and a small quern before reaching the nave, where the walls are whitewashed, the pews are numbered box pews, the ceiling is a plain barrel and the sanctuary floor is laid with Victorian encaustic tiles. Who the church is named for is unsettled: some hold it to be Eigen, a daughter of the British leader Caractacus, others Eigion, brother of St Cynidr of Glasbury. The parish keeps both traditions and settles neither.

The church sits on a spur above the Digedi Brook. Llanigon is not one street but a scatter of house-clusters strung along the water, three kilometres south of Hay-on-Wye, with the land rising behind it towards the Black Mountains. The brook joins the Wye a little under two kilometres to the north-west. About a hundred yards east of the church stands Ty Mawr, a half-timbered farmhouse of the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century; the Old Post Office nearby dates to the late eighteenth, and the house beside it carries a date-stone of 1692.

Food and market in nearby Hay

A nineteenth-century cluster here once held the church, vicarage, school, an inn whose name is lost, and Ty Mawr; for food and a pint today you go to Hay. The Three Tuns, which Hay's tourist office calls the town's oldest pub, occupies a sixteenth-century building and has operated since the eighteenth century; it does a Hay Charcuterie platter, beef-brisket ragù tagliatelle, baked cod with Tuscan bean stew, and pizzas including the "Rodfather" of 'nduja, salami and smoked prosciutto; well-behaved dogs are welcome on a lead in the downstairs bar and the beer garden. Hay Deli on Lion Street sells organic and local produce, and the Thursday street market has run in some form for more than seven hundred years.

From Llanigon to the Black Mountains

Walkers have the better of it. The Water from the Mountains circular, a ten-mile guided walk run in 2023, sets out from Llanigon itself, by fields, woodland paths and lanes up to the small commons under Twmpa, past streams, footbridges, fords and dipping pools, with the Wye and the mountains laid out below. South of the village the single-track road climbs to Gospel Pass, between Twmpa and Hay Bluff; the Bluff is 677 metres and strenuous in parts, and from the Gospel Pass side the Offa's Dyke Path runs on over the Black Mountains ridge and through Hay.

Kilvert, the motte and the railway collapse

The Victorian diarist Francis Kilvert walked over from Hay often. At Llanthomas he asked the vicar William Thomas for permission to marry Thomas's daughter Daisy, and was refused. Below Llanthomas a scheduled medieval motte still stands beside the Digedi, a steep oval mound about three metres high. On 17 June 1880, after the last passenger train of the day had crossed, torrential rain undermined the railway bridge over the brook, and the goods train following behind fell into it.

Reaching Llanigon

Llanigon is reached by car on a minor road about 3 km south of Hay; the practical railhead is Hereford, about twenty-one miles away, with buses on to Hay. The B49 links Talgarth, Llanigon and Hay too, but only on Thursdays and only if you book ahead. It stops at Ash Grove, and the old stop it replaced is now a book swap.