Talgarth

Talgarth, a decayed market town in Breconshire, South Wales, situated on the Ennig near its junction with the Llynfi (a tributary of the Wye), with a station on the joint line of the Cambrian and Midland companies from Brecon to Three Cocks Junction (22 m. N.N.E., but in Talgarth parish). The population of the whole parish (which measures 12,294 acres) was 1466 in 1901. The church of St Gwendoline, restored in 1873, is in Perpendicular style, with an embattled tower restored in 1898. The Baptists, Congregationalists and Calvinistic Methodists have each a chapel in the town, and there is also a Congregational church at Tredwestan, founded in 1662. About m. S.W. is Trevecca, where Howel Harris, one of the founders of Welsh Methodism, was born in 1713, and where in 1752 he established a communistic religious "family" of about a hundred persons; their representatives in 1842 handed over the property to the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist connexion, who in that year opened there a theological college, and in 1874 added to it a Harris memorial chapel. In 1906 the college was removed to Aberystwyth, and the buildings are now used by the Connexion as a preparatory school for ministerial students.

The fortified station of Dinas occupies the summit of a hill about 22 m. S.E. of Talgarth, and commands the mountain pass to Crickhowell and the eastern part of the vale of Usk. Its castle, built on the site of an earlier British fortress, was destroyed (according to Leland) by the inhabitants to prevent its falling into the hands of Glendower. The town was in the manor of English Talgarth, there being also a manor of Welsh Talgarth, in which Welsh laws prevailed.