No affiliate links in this one. Just a stop on the way home.
It is 3am, a few nights after we got back, and I am reading about a Victorian water company that flooded an entire Welsh village on purpose. We had driven past Lake Vyrnwy a hundred times without really stopping to think about it. This time we stopped, and it turns out there is a lot more under that water than fish.
An easy detour on the way home from Henstent
Lake Vyrnwy is only 20 minutes from Henstent Park, where we had just spent the weekend, so on the way home we parked up between the dam and Bethania watersports. Easy parking for a 6 metre van, no drama. From there it is a 10 minute walk up the lakeside to a little beach, where we sat with the dogs and did nothing much beyond admiring the view for a while. Then on to a tiny cafe near the Chocolate Cabin for a coffee before the drive home.
Honest caveat: the drive from Henstent to Vyrnwy is genuinely scenic, but several miles of it are single-track lane, and it was not entirely stress-free even in the Giottivan. I would not want to do that particular stretch in a bigger van. Once at the lake itself, the road around it is normal width and the parking is straightforward.
The village Lake Vyrnwy drowned
Lake Vyrnwy is not a natural lake. It is a Victorian reservoir, built in the 1880s by Liverpool Corporation to supply fresh drinking water to Liverpool and Merseyside. The dam was completed in 1888 and was the first large stone-built dam in the UK, and the first anywhere designed to let surplus water cascade straight over its face rather than through a side channel. It is still an impressive thing to stand next to.
Building it meant flooding the head of the valley, and with it the original village of Llanwddyn. A new Llanwddyn, the name it still carries today, was built about two miles away on higher ground. Around 300 people live there now. What follows is what I found out at 3am about the village that is still down there, and about the thing everybody thinks they can see in the water.
Is there a church spire under Lake Vyrnwy?
No. And I want to deal with that first, because it is the thing people arrive expecting.
The tower you can see standing in the water is not a church. It is the straining tower, and it is where the water leaves the lake. It was designed by George Frederick Deacon, one of the two engineers on the scheme, and it is reportedly modelled on the castle at Chillon in Switzerland. Victorian visitors compared it to a castle on the Rhine. It is around fifty metres tall, it stands in about fifteen metres of water, and a good deal of it is below the surface. Inside are the strainers themselves, huge wire mesh filters, and an engine room reached by a spiral staircase that still holds its original equipment.
It looks like a church because Deacon built it in Gothic Revival, which is what you did in 1881 when you wanted a piece of industrial plumbing to look like it belonged in a valley. That is the whole explanation.
The old parish church went the same way as everything else. Nothing was left standing to poke through the water later. The drowned spire is a story that attaches itself to almost every British reservoir, and it is wrong at nearly all of them. Kielder in Northumberland has the same legend and the same answer from the water company: the buildings were taken down and the materials carted away.
What was actually down there
Llanwddyn was a working parish, not a hamlet. The parish church, two chapels, three inns, ten farmhouses, thirty seven houses and a mill. A school and a post office. Families who had been in that valley for generations, speaking Welsh, farming ground their grandparents had farmed.
The first commemorative stone was laid on 14 July 1881 by the third Earl of Powys, who happened to be one of the owners of the village that was about to be drowned. There were protests and there was a petition. Neither changed anything.
Here is the part that stayed with me at 3am. They did not flood the village. They dismantled it first. Roofs were stripped, timbers taken out, stone walls pulled down. What went under the water was a demolition site, not a village. Sir Edmund Buckley’s Eunant Hall was pulled down too.
And then the churchyard. The dead were exhumed and reburied beside the new church that Liverpool Corporation had built for the living, further down the valley. Whatever you think about the ethics of the scheme, somebody had to stand in that churchyard and do that work, and somebody else had to watch it being done to their family.
The new St Wddyn’s church opened in 1888, the day before the engineers closed the valves on the dam. The lake filled faster than anyone had predicted and water was running over the lip of the dam by 1889. It still took until 1892 for any of it to reach a tap in Liverpool, because sixty eight miles of aqueduct had to be laid across mid Wales and Shropshire first.
The engineers were Thomas Hawksley and George Frederick Deacon. When it was finished it was the first large masonry dam in Britain and the largest reservoir in Europe.
Forty four men
This is the bit nobody puts on the postcards.
On the hill above, near the new church, there is an obelisk. It remembers ten men killed during the building works and a further thirty four who died of other causes while construction was going on. Seven years of work, forty four dead. It is Grade II listed now, standing in the trees above the hotel, and almost nobody walks up to it.
Nobody argues the men who built this were treated badly by the standards of 1885. That is rather the point. Forty four is what a scheme like this simply cost, and it was recorded on a stone and then forgotten about.
When the village comes back
It does come back, and it has done several times.
The first recorded time was September 1933, when a drought dropped the water far enough to expose the remains for the first time since 1888. It happened again in the dry summer of 2022, which is when most of the photographs you will have seen online were taken.
Set your expectations honestly, though. Because the village was demolished before it was flooded, what surfaces is foundations, wall footings, field boundaries and the line of a road. It is the plan of a village rather than a village. That is arguably more affecting, but it is not the sunken street people imagine.
When we were there the water was high and there was nothing to see. If you want a chance at it you need a properly dry summer, not just a dry fortnight.
The one that came afterwards
If this story sounds familiar it is because Wales had it done twice.
In 1965 the village of Capel Celyn in the Tryweryn valley was flooded, also to supply Liverpool. That one became genuinely political and it is still remembered in a way Llanwddyn is not, partly because it happened within living memory and partly because the community fought it much harder and lost anyway.
Vyrnwy came seventy seven years earlier and gets talked about as scenery. Standing on the dam it is worth holding both things in your head at once. It is a beautiful piece of Victorian engineering, and the reason it is beautiful is that somebody decided a Welsh valley was the right place to put it.
The village today
Modern Llanwddyn sits above the waterline with holiday statics and lodges scattered up the hillside, a proper little tourist economy built around the lake and the RSPB reserve it now supports. Cujo and Blaze found their own stretch of stream near the static caravans to cool off in, which by that point in the weekend had become the theme of the whole trip.
The sculpture park, and the giant we did not go and see
There is a sculpture park at the dam end, across the river from the car park and the playground, and it is about as easy as a walk gets. Flat grass, winding paths under the trees, carved wooden pieces spaced along the way, benches to sit on and the dam standing behind the whole thing. Ten or fifteen minutes if you simply walk it, and it will take a pushchair.
Set your expectations sensibly, because opinion on it is split. Plenty of people love it. Others have arrived expecting a gallery, found a handful of weathered carvings in a field and said so publicly. Wood left outdoors in mid Wales does what wood left outdoors in mid Wales does. Treat it as a pleasant twenty minutes attached to the dam rather than a reason to drive over on its own.
The better thing is at the far end of the lake, and most people arriving for the day have no idea it is there. In the woodland at the northern end, signposted from a small free car park near the bridge, stands the Giant Hand of Vyrnwy.
It was a tree first. A Douglas fir that had been growing on the estate for 124 years and stood 209 feet, tall enough to be reckoned the tallest tree in Britain. In 2011 it was found leaning, with two long cracks running up from the roots, and there was no argument to be had about it. It had to come down. Rather than clear the stump, Natural Resources Wales commissioned a carving, and a chainsaw artist from Wrexham called Simon O’Rourke submitted a design for a hand.
What stands there now is fifty feet of tree that begins as ordinary bark at the bottom and turns, as your eye goes up it, into a forearm and an open hand reaching for the sky. Seven feet from wrist to fingertip, veins and creases and all. He modelled it on his own hand. The scaffolding alone took two days to put up on that ground, and the carving took six.
The block of woodland it stands in is called the Giants of Vyrnwy, which is where the idea came from. That is the part I keep coming back to. Everything in this valley got taken down and turned into something else. The village came down so the lake could go up, the plumbing got a Gothic tower built around it, and the tallest tree in Britain became a hand.
We did not go and see it. We had twenty minutes, a coffee and two dogs who had already decided the day was about water, so the hand is still on the list. If you are making a proper day of Vyrnwy rather than a stop on the way home, do not do what I did.
The RSPB reserve, which is most of what you are looking at
The water belongs to Hafren Dyfrdwy. Almost everything around it is a nature reserve, and that is a far bigger operation than the word reserve suggests. RSPB Cymru works the estate in partnership with the water company and directly manages roughly half of it, close to 5,000 hectares of moorland, woodland and meadow, including one of the largest blanket bog restorations in Wales.
Entry is free, it is open all year and there are public rights of way through it, including the circuit of the lake. What you see depends on where you stand. Wood warbler and willow tit in the trees, dipper working the rocky streams, goosander out on the water, and peregrine overhead if you happen to be looking up at the right moment. There are hides, and the one beside the car park is wheelchair accessible.
One rule worth knowing before you set off. Dogs have to be on leads across the whole reserve, all of the time, because of ground nesting birds and livestock. It looks like open hillside and it is not treated as one. Assistance dogs are welcome everywhere.
There is no RSPB cafe on site either, which catches people out. Food is the Artisans cafe by the Coed y Capel car park, the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel about a mile from the dam, or Dafarn Newydd Stores in the village. The car parks all belong to Hafren Dyfrdwy and some of them charge, though RSPB members get half off where charges apply, as long as the membership card is sitting next to the ticket.
The practical bits
Parking. Coed y Capel car park is 150 metres from the dam, the main car park 300 metres. All of them are Hafren Dyfrdwy’s, some charge, and RSPB members get 50 per cent off where they do. We parked between the dam and Bethania and a 6 metre van was no trouble.
Getting there. The road around the lake is normal width and fine. The lanes in from the Henstent side are single track for several miles, and I would not take anything bigger than the Giottivan down them.
The dam. Finished in 1888. First large stone built dam in Britain, and the first anywhere designed to spill over its own face.
The tower. A straining tower, not a church. Around fifty metres tall, standing in about fifteen metres of water.
Sculpture park. Short flat loop at the dam end, ten to fifteen minutes, pushchair friendly, benches and picnic spots.
Giant Hand of Vyrnwy. Northern end of the lake, small free car park near the bridge, signposted path through the woods.
RSPB reserve. Free, open all year. Dogs on leads everywhere, no exceptions. No cafe on the reserve itself.
Seeing the village. Foundations, wall footings and field boundaries only, and only in a genuine drought. It last happened in 1933 and 2022. The water was high when we went and there was nothing to see.
Worth the stop
We have driven past Lake Vyrnwy more times than I can count without really stopping. This time, twenty minutes and a short walk turned it from a nice view out of the window into somewhere with an actual story attached, and a slightly uncomfortable one at that: a whole community moved, more or less on Liverpool’s timetable, so a city could have water. Worth building into any trip through this part of Wales, whether you are coming from Henstent Park or exploring the wider area covered in our North Wales campervan sites roundup.
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About the author
I’m Pete Harrison. I’m 55, I run a business, and I have a mild case of insomnia that means I spend a lot of time at 3am reading about gadgets, gear and, this time, Victorian reservoir engineering. Things I Learnt at 3am is where I write honestly about the things I’ve actually bought, tested and lived with. No fluff, no rehashing the spec sheet. Just the real verdict from someone who uses this stuff every day.
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