Pontsticill

Reservoir-side arrivals and the Red Cow

The Brecon Mountain Railway pulls in at Pontsticill station with a café beside the platform and an adventure playground behind it, and from the outdoor tables you look straight across Pontsticill Reservoir to the ridges beyond. The café runs on the days the trains run, selling drinks, ice cream and snacks. The village sits in the Taf Fechan valley just below the reservoir, at the southern edge of Bannau Brycheiniog, with conifer forest on one side and open upland on the other. On a clear afternoon the line's operator will tell you Pen y Fan is visible from here.

Two pubs anchor the place. The Red Cow — Y Buwch Coch — is stone-built and stands in the village centre, busy with walkers coming off the hills and people down for the water and the railway. The food is straightforward: a tuna jacket potato with salad, a double cheeseburger with bacon and hand-cut chips, lasagne, Sunday dinner. Dogs come indoors, and there is covered seating out in the car park. Wye Valley Butty Bach is the regular cask beer, with Grey Trees and other Wye Valley beers rotating through the changing taps.

A second table and a self-reliant village

A few hundred metres away, near the reservoir and the station, the Butchers Arms is an independent country pub with a garden that looks out over the water. The kitchen leans Welsh and generous: slow-cooked Welsh Black beef and stout pie, Glamorgan sausages, beer-battered cod, a prime-beef smash burger, a mixed grill and a vegan Penang curry. Two changing cask ales, usually Grey Trees or Butty Bach. There is live music, a small car park and an eighteen-bed bunkhouse arranged across three rooms.

Beyond the pubs, the village looks after itself. The community group keeps the play park, the public toilets, the flower beds and a book exchange going, and has a Green Flag to show for it. Pontsticill has no shop; the station café is the main food outlet outside the pubs.

Routes from riverbank to ridgeline

Walking is a major draw. A waymarked 1.2-mile circular follows the Taf Fechan through tall conifers in about forty-five minutes, muddy and uneven in places. The Taff Trail, the fifty-five-mile Cardiff-to-Brecon route, passes the reservoir on its way north. For the ambitious there is a ten-mile horseshoe over Corn Du, Pen y Fan and Cribyn — full mountain kit, five or six hours, not to be undertaken lightly. Buses 24 and 25 connect the village to Merthyr Tydfil, the nearest mainline station, though the mountain road has been subject to closure, so it is worth checking your route before setting off.

The bridge beneath the village name

The name comes from a bridge. Pont Sticill, a single stone span with an 1825 datestone, still carries the old mountain road over the river. When the valley was flooded for the reservoir in 1927, the Bethlehem chapel went under with it; its congregation held their last service there in September 1925, and when the reservoir level is very low, the ruins can surface again.

A railway rebuilt from bare track

The railway itself is a resurrection. The Brecon and Merthyr line ran from 1863 to 1964, and when it closed the rails, girders and ballast were all stripped out. Anthony Hills rebuilt much of the infrastructure — seven bridges repaired or replaced, the Pontsticill waiting room turned into a workshop — and reopened the Pant-to-Pontsticill stretch in 1980 behind a small locomotive called Sybil. "Dad had a simple vision — to leave something behind for people to enjoy," his son Matthew said of him. "The railway was his life." On running days it still climbs past the village and along the length of the water.