Visiting Brecon Town

Brecon, an ancient town and noted as the direct and principal cross roads in 1811.  Called by the Welsh, Aberhonddu as the town is at the conflux of the Honddau and Usk Rivers.

Brecon has its own cathedral, the Priory Church of St John, the centre of the diocese of Swansea and Brecon since 1923.  The cathedral still dominates the town, it has a choir and a nave in the still later Decorated style.  The font suggest some foundation older than that of the main building.  Its side chapels are evocative of the Middle Ages with their names of the corvizors (shoemakers) tailors, weaver, tuckers and fullers.  The Parish Church of St Mary is also of Norman foundation with at least one pillar of Norman style, though the tower is 16-century.  Of the castle, only fragments remain, part in the gardens of the Castle Hotel, and part in the Ely Tower, a residence of the Bishop where the overthrow of Richard III and accession of Henry VII was plotted. 

Its first connection with history seems to belong to the Iron Age hill-fort, Pen-y-crug, immediately to the north on a hill above the town. The ridge on which Aberhonndu stands was not seen as a strategic point until the Normans came into Wales in the 11th-century.  Today Brecon still remembers Nest, the fatal princess who involved Bernard and his son in he feuds of the South when family hatred made no distrinction between Welsh and Norman.  It remembers the Norman overlord, William de Braose who succeeded to the Neufmarches and had the young Trahaiarn of Wales treacherous mocked and slaughtered in its streets.  And Charles I who entered Brecon more for meditation than battle during the 17-century Civil War and the town escaped combat from the Roundheads.

Brecon a pleasant and prosperous place, the market for the farming valleys in the area and popular with tourists.  It is a centre for education - Christ's College, founded in 1541 as part of the great tudor experiment in education and refounded in 1855.  Its museum of great interest for its Roman and medieval relics.