A market town since 1291
Machynlleth's recorded story begins with a piece of parchment. In 1291 Edward I granted Owen de la Pole a royal charter for “a market at Machynlleth every Wednesday for ever and two fairs every year” — and the phrase has proved remarkably literal. More than 730 years on, around 50 traders still set up along Maengwyn Street every Wednesday, making it one of the longest-running weekly markets in Wales. The town grew where two natural routes meet — today's A487 between Dolgellau and Aberystwyth and the A489 towards Newtown — at the head of the Dyfi Valley in the old county of Montgomeryshire, now Powys. It has never been large (the 2011 census counted 2,235 people), yet its position made it the natural trading centre for a wide sweep of hill country, with Aberystwyth 18 miles away, Aberdovey 11 and Welshpool 38. That mix of small size and outsized importance runs right through the town's history.
1404: Owain Glyndŵr's capital
One year dominates everything. Owain Glyndŵr's rebellion against English rule broke out at Ruthin in September 1400, and by 1404 he controlled enough of Wales to summon a parliament at Machynlleth. That year he was crowned Prince of Wales here, before envoys from Scotland, France and Spain — the moment that earned Machynlleth its unofficial title of “ancient capital of Wales” (formal city-status bids in 2000 and 2002 both failed, but the name has stuck). Glyndŵr held his final parliament at nearby Pennal in 1406, from where his famous letter to the King of France was sent. The full story — from the first uprising to the Battle of Hyddgen in 1401 — is told on our Owain Glyndŵr page and brought to life at the Parliament House exhibition on Heol Maengwyn.
Three buildings that tell the story
Three landmarks anchor the town's past. The Parliament House on Heol Maengwyn is a late-medieval town house tree-ring dated to around 1470 — a generation after Glyndŵr — but it stands on or near the site traditionally associated with the 1404 parliament. Bought in 1906 by David Davies of Llandinam, it was restored and reopened on 20 February 1912 as an institute, and today houses a free exhibition and the 1912–14 Murray Urquhart mural of Glyndŵr's life. Royal House, at 13/15 Heol Penrallt, is a mid-16th-century merchant's house-and-shop with timbers dated 1559–61 (its store dates from 1576). The story that Charles I stayed there in 1643 is legend, and the tale of Dafydd Gam's imprisonment predates the building itself — but the Grade II* house, restored from 2005 and reopened in 2006, remains a handsome streetside landmark. The third is the youngest and most famous: the 23.7-metre clock tower of 1874, designed by Henry Kennedy and now Grade II listed, which gave Machynlleth its nickname — “the town with the clock”.
The Plas and the Londonderry era
Behind the main street stands Plas Machynlleth, a mansion recorded since the 17th century under its original name of Greenfields. Bought by the solicitor John Edwards in the 1750s, it gained its three-storey core in 1765 and was enlarged by Sir John Edwards, 1st Baronet. When his daughter Mary Cornelia married George Vane-Tempest — later 5th Marquess of Londonderry — in 1846, the Plas became the family's Welsh seat, and their influence is stamped on the town: the clock tower itself was raised by public subscription to mark the 1873 coming-of-age of Viscount Castlereagh, the Marquess's son. In 1948 the 7th Marquess gave the mansion and its 40-acre grounds to the town, and after a £3m refurbishment it reopened in 1995 as the Celtica heritage centre, which ran until 2006. Today Y Plas is the community's own — home to the Town Council, Caffi y Plas and a free public park.
A green and creative town today
Modern Machynlleth wears its history lightly and its ideals openly. In 1973 the Centre for Alternative Technology was founded in a disused slate quarry three miles north, and its pioneering work on sustainability shaped the town's green, independent character (note that CAT now welcomes pre-booked visits, courses and groups rather than walk-up day trips). In 1986 a former Wesleyan chapel on Heol Penrallt reopened as the Tabernacle arts centre, which grew into MOMA Machynlleth with seven galleries and an annual late-August music festival. And since 2010 the Machynlleth Comedy Festival has taken over the town each early-May bank holiday, growing from around 500 attendees to more than 8,000. Add the Wednesday market, the living Welsh language and a setting at the heart of Wales's UNESCO Dyfi Biosphere, and the ancient capital feels anything but stuck in the past.
Slate, tramroads and the last of the quarry trade
Machynlleth's Victorian century was built on slate. The Corris, Machynlleth and River Dovey Tramroad Act passed on 12 July 1858, and by April 1859 a horse-drawn tramroad of 2ft 3in gauge was hauling slate down the Dulas valley from the quarries at Corris and Aberllefenni. Steam arrived in December 1878, an Act of 1883 allowed fare-paying passengers, and the Great Western Railway bought the line in 1929; passenger trains ceased in 1931 and the last train of all ran on 20 August 1948. Aberllefenni quarry, worked industrially from 1810, stopped extracting slate only in 2002.
The main line, and the wages it brought
The standard-gauge railway turned Machynlleth into a working railway town. The Newtown and Machynlleth Railway was authorised on 27 July 1857 and carried its first passengers on 31 December 1862; its engineers abandoned a planned tunnel at Talerddig for a cutting 120 feet deep, for some years reckoned the deepest in the world. The company passed to Cambrian Railways in the 1860s and the Great Western in 1922, and an engine shed of 1863 grew into a depot that kept the town in railway wages for a century. Signalling for the whole Cambrian route has been controlled from Machynlleth since the 1980s; for today's services see getting here.
A chapel town, and what became of the chapels
Nonconformity shaped the town as firmly as the market did, and it did so in Welsh. Maengwyn Chapel, Welsh Calvinistic Methodist, began around 1784, was rebuilt in 1822 and rebuilt again in 1867 to a Gothic design by William Henry Spaull of Oswestry at a cost of £3,500; it seated 700, and its stone came out of the Talerddig railway cutting. The Wesleyans' Tabernacle was built in 1806, extended in 1843 and rebuilt in June 1880. That building, with the former grocer's shop beside it, became the town's arts centre — its first exhibition opened in May 1992 — and is now MOMA Machynlleth. The Welsh those congregations kept alive is still the language of the street.
Day trips