The Begwns

The Begwns, or sometimes The Begwyns, form a small upland area in eastern Powys, Wales. They sit within the communities of Painscastle, Glasbury and Clyro, to the north of a great bend in the course of the Wye valley, west of Hay-on-Wye. ‘Begwns' is a cymricisation of the English ‘beacons’. The Begwns are 1293 acres of common land which was given to the National Trust by the Maesllwch Estate in 1992 and managed for grazing and quiet recreation. The common ranges in elevation from 250m at its lowest to 415m at ‘The Roundabout’, a hilltop wooded feature at the heart of the area. A trig point immediately outside of this enclosure is 1m lower. The trees were planted here to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee with a wall constructed around them in 1887 for protection. There are a handful of small pools on the common, of which the largest is Monks Pond. These ponds contain the increasingly uncommon aquatic fern, pillwort and other uncommon pond plants like tubular water-dropwort. Numerous springs feed streams which run both north to a small river known as the Bachawy, a left-bank tributary of the Wye, and to the south, directly into the Wye.