Monks Trod: safeguarding the soul of Wales’ upland culture

Antony David Davies FRSA

I grew up hearing family stories of the hills above Llanwrin, where my ancestors farmed at Caeadda — an upland holding steeped in the quiet cadences of chapel life, droving traditions and the relentless work of sheep and cattle on the thin soils of Montgomeryshire.

Over the years, that personal connection led me deeper into the intertwined history of Wales’s rural communities, our Nonconformist chapels, the drovers who knitted the country together, and the upland tracks that bore silent witness to it all.

That journey of research eventually became my first book, Old Llyfnant Farming Families, and has grown into a more ambitious new study on Caeadda and the imagination of the Welsh uplands, currently under consideration by Y Lolfa — a publisher whose very catalogue is a testament to Wales’s cultural distinctiveness.

Fellow

More recently, I was honoured to be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, recognised specifically for my ongoing work in preserving and promoting the story of Wales’s rural landscapes and communities. It is a duty I take to heart.

Which is why I find myself compelled to speak about the Monks Trod, that fragile upland route winding between the abbeys of Cwm-Hir and Strata Florida across the Cambrian Mountains.

This is not simply a rough old byway awaiting modern engineering. It is, in many ways, a living artery of Wales’s cultural memory — a corridor walked by Cistercian monks who knitted faith and farming together, later trodden by generations of drovers moving cattle from upland farmsteads like my own forebears’, and by chapel-goers finding their way across the moors to distant preaching houses.

Too often when these questions come up before planning authorities, they are framed narrowly: either as ecological balances to be weighed (peat depth, nesting birds, SSSIs), or as issues of access and recreation — off-roaders versus walkers.

But if we stop there, we miss what is most precious. This landscape is not only an environmental asset; it is a living cultural one. It embodies centuries of how upland Wales lived, worked, prayed and connected.

Damage

What worries me most about current proposals to resurface and intensify motor access on the Monks Trod is not merely the potential damage to peatland or biodiversity.

It is the deeper, more irrecoverable loss: once you engineer such a path into a modern conduit, you sever the fragile thread of historical continuity. The experience of walking there — feeling the same winds that turned my ancestors’ faces raw, tracing the same ruts that drovers carved — becomes something else entirely. It shifts from a lived inheritance to a sanitised route, easier on tyres perhaps, but emptied of much of its ancestral resonance.

This matters far beyond Powys. In recent years we have already seen the heart taken out of so many upland communities: chapels closed or hollowed into holiday homes, small schools shut, local marts struggling to hold on.

The Cambrian Mountains in particular represent one of the last great canvases where the story of rural Wales is still written across the land itself, largely uncluttered by modern infrastructure. To treat something like the Monks Trod as just another local highways matter is to profoundly misunderstand what is at stake.

We are at a moment when the idea of cultural landscapes — places where history, memory and identity are embodied in terrain — is being recognised internationally. Wales should be leading that conversation, not quietly betraying it.

There is still time for Powys County Council, heritage bodies and local representatives to think more boldly: to see the Monks Trod as not merely a maintenance headache or a tourism asset, but as part of our collective moral responsibility to safeguard the soul of upland Wales.

As someone whose family roots, scholarly life and sense of cultural duty are all tied to these hills, I believe we owe it to those who came before us — monks, drovers, chapel singers and quiet farmers — to tread carefully. Once we lose the living fabric of these routes, we lose a part of ourselves.

Let us not be the generation that finally engineered away the whispering tracks of our own story.

Antony David Davies FRSA is a historian of Welsh upland communities, author of Old Llyfnant Farming Families, with deep family roots in Montgomeryshire.