They were setting up market stalls around the handsome half-timbered Tudor market hall in the centre of Llanidloes. We stopped in Long Bridge Street to buy Welsh cakes in Talerddig Bakery and some Black Bomber cheese from Darren Tonks’s fine food emporium. Llanidloes is long-settled, neat, well-provisioned and a little bit rarified in flavour, with the River Severn on its doorstep and the mid-Wales hills cradling it in isolation.
Up in Allt Goch Wood, dream-catchers of twigs and feathers turned in the wind, suspended in the framework of an ash-bough bender. Wooden shelters and a stout earth closet hinted at alternative lifestyles being enacted among the trees. Beyond the woods the bathing goddess symbol of the Severn Way beckoned us east along old-fashioned country lanes