The clock that once kept time at Coleg Trefeca now sits in a case inside it, retired to the Howell Harris Museum. It stands off the B4560 between Talgarth and Llangorse, a Grade II* building with turrets, ogee-headed windows and, in what was Lady Huntingdon's Dining Room, an octagonal plaster ceiling. At its centre there was once an Eye of God, which is missing.
The museum is a visitor facility in the village itself, and it shares a building that still works for a living: Coleg Trefeca is a lay-training, retreat and conference centre for the Presbyterian Church of Wales, so it is worth ringing ahead before you set out. The collection runs across architecture, religion, social history and, unexpectedly, weapons and war.
For food and a pint you go to the neighbouring villages. In Bronllys, the Cock Hotel is run by Melissa and Steve, with Drew Clouston in the kitchen after a spell heading a seafood restaurant in the Isles of Scilly. He puts out a homemade pie of the day, a Bronllys beef burger, salt-and-pepper squid, and a sun-blushed tomato, spinach and broccoli tagliatelle; the meat comes from P. F. Sweeney in Brecon. In Talgarth, the New Gurkha Inn cooks Nepalese and Gurkha food, some of it ground in a stone mortar—chicken and lamb momo, chicken chhoyala, a Gurkha nettle curry made with fresh herbs.
Talgarth is also where the shopping happens. Talgarth Mill is a working watermill on the river, with the Triggs café, the Pobl bakery turning out naturally fermented breads, and a shop selling the mill's own additive-free wholemeal flour, ground on French burr stones. Dick Donovan, one of the volunteer millers, once showed the operation to a Countryfile crew.
The history here is a single, strange episode. Howell Harris was born at Trefeca in 1714, refused ordination four times because of his outdoor and house preaching, and in the 1750s enlarged his own home into a self-sufficient religious community. Madam Sidney Griffith of Cefnamlwch gave £900 towards it, and the money bought a chapel, an infirmary, a bathhouse, a dovecote and a fishpond. At its height roughly 120 people lived here and worked as many as sixty trades. Harris ran a woollen school with eight looms and a printing press, and that press later produced the John Canne Bible in 1790.
John Wesley came to look in August 1763 and wrote in his journal that "the little chapel ... gardens, orchards, fish-ponds, and the mount adjoining make the place a little paradise."
A route from Talgarth threads through the mill and Bronllys Castle before following the Llynfi to Trefeca and Holywell Spring, then on to the Penyrwrlodd long cairn, a particularly good Severn-Cotswold tomb. The Black Mountains sit behind everything, their Old Red Sandstone worn soft.
The X12 bus stops at Trefeca and reaches Talgarth, Crickhowell and Abergavenny, though at present it runs once each way on Tuesdays and Thursdays.