Talybont-on-Usk

Canal-side food and village pubs

A swing bridge carries the lane over the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal in the middle of Talybont-on-Usk, and beside it stands the village stores, post office and Canalside Cafe under one roof. The shop and post office occupy one side, the cafe the other. The cafe cooks from locally sourced produce where it can, and its range is wider than a canal-bank cafe has any need to be. Alongside a Canalside breakfast and a bacon, brie and cranberry panini, you can order Bombay pav bhaji, scampi with homemade coleslaw and chips, or a Gujarati thali in vegetarian, vegan or chicken Madras form.

The Star and the White Hart are the village's two pubs, both a short walk from the water. The White Hart is an old coaching inn with a bar and restaurant beside the canal, and well-behaved dogs are welcome in the seating areas at the front and rear. The Brinore Tramroad, signed, begins directly behind it. The Star Inn sits at the centre with a large garden running down to the river behind the pub, and dogs are welcome here too. One regular, Patrick M, summed it up in a review as "all round great boozer full of great locals, good beer and lovely atmosphere."

Tramroad walks and family space

That tramroad behind the White Hart is a longer walk than most. It runs eight miles from the canal wharf up through the Talybont and Dyffryn Crawnon valleys to the uplands at Trefil, and it carried coal and limestone from 1815 to 1865. At the wharf where it starts, preserved limekilns, an information board and a replica tram set out the industrial story before you climb. For something gentler, the Community Council's Henry Vaughan Walk makes a 5.3-kilometre circuit from the canal bank through meadows and riverside fields, and the towpath itself leads to Pencelli and the canal-side garden of the Royal Oak.

Henderson Hall's playing fields give families somewhere to spread out: a games area, cricket pitch, bike ramps and a children's play area, with public toilets, coin-operated showers and a rainwater-fed bike wash at the hall.

Landscape and connections

The village sits in Bannau Brycheiniog, hemmed by canal, rivers, reservoir and hills, with the slopes of Tor y Foel rising to the south. Brecon, seven miles off, is the nearest town for a proper shop. Talybont is on the B4558, about a mile south of the A40; the X43 Brecon to Abergavenny bus stops here, and the nearest railway station is at Abergavenny, some fifteen miles away.

St Tetti at Llandetty

A little way out at Llandetty, the church of St Tetti is a small thirteenth-century nave and chancel on a much older Christian site, Grade II* and rich for its size: a ninth-century inscribed pillar, an octagonal medieval font, a painted Hanoverian coat of arms and three notable yews. Its churchyard commemorates 310 ex-servicemen who once lived nearby. Local tradition holds that during the Commonwealth, Colonel Jenkin Jones drove out the priest and used the church as a farm building, and that after the king's return he fired at the fleeing priest's door, leaving the bullet hole you can still see.

Industry, rail and community power

Talybont grew up around its canal, tramroad and railway; the line, opened in 1863, brought the first bridge across the Usk and gave Station Road its name. There were once five pubs, a foundry, a woollen mill and two corn mills here. Below the reservoir, volunteers rediscovered a disused 1930s turbine house — "there it was, a turbine house waiting for a turbine" — and after a village meeting of some thirty people in 2001, they filled it. Wales's first community-owned hydro scheme has generated power on the hillside above the village since 2005, though the turbine fell silent between 2016 and its restart in April 2023.