With its overhanging limestone rocks and wide main street, Llanymynech was once compared – favourably – to a village in Switzerland. These days first impressions of Llanymynech may be less positive, with its constant traffic and narrow pavements, the flat roof of a former petrol filling station the most dominant architecture at the crossroads.
But look at those old pictures of the village, ones taken a hundred years ago, and imagine a place where the only traffic is an occasional horse and trap, there were wide spreading green trees at the crossroads, a stone pedestal, little shops along the main road, and above everything the exposed rocks of Llanymynech Hill seeming to hang perilously over the village, and it is possible to see that with only a very few alterations – some trees and a bypass, say – Llanymynech could once again be a pretty and charming village.
But even if trees are unlikely to replace the filling station roof, and no bypass will now be built, Llanymynech is more than just some buildings on a trunk road, as anyone who pauses for a moment and looks at the mainly very well restored 19th-century houses, and up at the rocks and trees to the north, will be able to see.
Llanymynech and Pant were once the centre for an extraordinary network of communications that have now almost gone – tramways, canals, railways – and industry that has completely ceased – the quarries and limeworks. There is much history here, ancient and mediaeval, the Romans certainly, Offa’s Dyke, and several archaeological remains.
There is the hill, too, one of the largest hillforts in Britain, with the Ogof, the cave that has so much to tell in historical terms, but is also the place of so much folklore.
Perhaps the most interesting fact about Llanymynech is its position. It is, I believe, unique as the only large village that has its main street as a border, so that the houses on the east side in England look out to houses on the west side in Wales.
Of course its position on the edge between the flat plains of England and the hills of Wales is one of the reasons so much happened here in the past. The reason the Romans came to fight Caractacus (if indeed his last stand was up on the hill), the reason Offa built his Dyke here, the reason limestone is here to be mined.
That there is so much more about Llanymynech and Pant than first impressions might give is the reason I wanted to write this book. I hope I have not got too many facts wrong, but I’m very sure there is much I have missed out: this is a place that holds many secrets.