Velindre

Brook, Common and Village Life

Velindre has a community-made booky bus shelter, and the Thursday B49 to Talgarth and Hay — pre-booked, two hours' notice — is the bus that stops here. The village runs along Felindre Brook beneath the Black Mountains, an older roadside core with newer houses set higher up the slope.

Start from the play park and you get the measure of the place quickly. A lane climbs past red-brick houses to a ford and on through forestry; one field along the way tends to hold pigs, chickens and a donkey. Up on Velindre Common, twenty minutes or so above the houses, the bracken and woodland open out to a wide, roughly 180-degree view.

Play Parks and Nearby Tables

There are two play parks, which is generous for a village this size — one a larger games area with a small bike trail, the other more conventional.

Food and drink mean a short drive. The Three Horseshoes, the village free house, closed at the end of 2023 and has not reopened. The nearest working pub is the Old Barn Inn at Three Cocks, run by the van der Linde family, who cook seasonal, locally sourced food. For more of an occasion, Foyles at Glasbury-on-Wye's example lunch menu lists Black Mountain smoked mackerel, pork schnitzel with sauerkraut and mustard sauce, and mussels and merguez in paprika cream; dogs are allowed in parts of the room if you mention it when booking.

Talgarth Provisions and Old Gwernyfed

There is no shop in Velindre. Talgarth, a short drive away, holds the rest. W.J. George is a butcher's that Billy George took over from his uncle in 1935 and that has been trading for more than 135 years, now with a delicatessen, the Deli Pot, alongside it. Inside Talgarth Mill — the only working watermill in the national park, still turning grain into wholemeal flour — Alex and Kathy bake naturally leavened bread, baguettes and croissants under the name Pobl, and Emma and Billy Trigg run the café.

Half a kilometre south-west, in open sloping ground, stands Old Gwernyfed: a Grade I manor, E-plan, largely rebuilt in the early 17th century for Sir David Williams, a judge and Brecon MP. Its porch carries a reset 13th-century arch said to have come from the village's own lost Norman chapel, though that has never been settled. Charles I stayed here on 6 August 1645, fleeing Brecon, and is supposed to have left a coded message on the hall screen for Prince Rupert. The south-west wing burned around 1780 and stands as a shell. The house is privately owned, with no general visitor access; you look at it, you do not visit it.

Roman Traces and Wider Walks

The land keeps older marks too. In the drought of July 2018 the outline of a Roman fort surfaced as cropmarks in the park nearby, on ground where iron-smelting furnaces had been dug out in 1951.

Walkers with a full day can start at Pen-yr-Heol Chapel and climb Rhiw Wen to Twmpa, then follow the ridge round by Capel-y-Ffin — eighteen kilometres and a long ascent, paid back in Wye Valley and mid-Wales hill views. Gentler is Pwll y Wrach near Talgarth, where a gravel path leads into the woods and a rougher one carries on to the waterfall. Hay-on-Wye, with its castle and its books, is about four miles off.

Roads, Rail and the Thursday Bus

The way in is down the A438 at Three Cocks and a signed turn for Felindre, after which the lanes narrow to single track and passing places; the nearest railway station, Builth Road, is some way off and unstaffed. The bus shelter waits in the village, and on Thursdays the bus comes.