Good things are happening on the railways of Wales. New trains, electrified lines, faster journeys, more late trains, more frequent services, extra seats and the promise of new services, such as a competitor to GWR speeding up trains from West Wales to London.(Due in late 2027.)

But it’s not all advance and improvement. We should be grateful that the Heart of Wales Line from St Shrewsbury to Swansea even exists – against the odds it survived the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. And it has been promoted as an attractive scenic route through magnificent landscape, with opportunities, at all the stations, for walking and cycling on a parallel path that shadows the railway throughout its route.

Until the timetable changes in December 2024, there were five trains a day on the line. Now the service has been trimmed to four, and two more late evening services over part of theline are being axed too. (“Bus options are currently being explored”.) Still plenty of opportunity for recreation, and the promise of access for people living in rural Wales and visitors. But a 20% service cut is regressive, just the same, when we need more trains, not fewer, to tempt as many people out of their cars as we can.

Transport for Wales, which runs the Heart of Wales Line on behalf of the Welsh government (it’s really a nationalised line) points out that it has to keep costs under control and that there is enhanced opportunity for walkers and cyclists on the adjacent footpath. But it’s still a cut. 

And there is the distant prospect of the long-shut Carmarthen to Aberystwyth line being rebuilt, to recreate a North to South rail connection within Wales once more. Cutting services on an existing line in rural Wales hardly bolsters the case for that link.

Below, a piece of mine on the line. 

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In this series I take a train to a station, walk to another station and head home.

The Heart of Wales Line – Bucknell to Knighton

 

The Shrewsbury to Swansea railway, The Heart of Wales Line, is a shining public transport survivor.

Spared during the Beeching cuts of the 1960s, it is a prime example of how to develop low carbon recreational travel on an existing railway.

In this series I take a train to a station, walk on to another station and head home.

This railway offers rich possibilities. The 140-mile long Heart of Wales Line Trail, shadowing the railway from Craven Arms to Llanelli, opened in 2019. The trail’s website describes, in close detail, the route ahead from all 23 halts.

I take the train from Shrewsbury (40 minutes) to Bucknell. My destination is Knighton, 8.6 miles (14 km) away, just over the border in Wales.

This is the land of the pine marten and tree pipit, of Owain Glyndŵr and Housman and the historical swirl and interchange of a border region. My path hovers on the edge of the Shropshire AONB. This is a patchwork of landscapes – limestone escarpment, rugged volcanic rocks, rounded sandstones, peaceful river valleys and luscious woods. And all of them equal. “No single feature or hill dominates.”

I leave little riverside Bucknell, secure in the website’s guidance. “At the second fork take the left hand track up through a group of native trees, principally oaks.

“Follow through a number of pastures, through four field gates.

”Fine views to Caer Caradoc hill fort. Drop steeply down to a lane: neat footwork is required as the path is heavily eroded in places.”

The Marches location has generated some picturesque names. Skyborry Green is an anglicisation of the Welsh for barn – ysgubor.  New Invention (yes, that’s the name), a location for the Powell and Pressburger film Gone to Earth; it has intriguing possible derivations. Wikipedia opts for the disappointingly prosaic: “New hamlet in a marshy place”. Other names are pleasingly distinctive, such as Panpunton and Purlogue, Heyop, Obley, Quabbs and lloyney.  And what is Five Turnings? “A junction of five ways in earlier times”. 

I head west along an old drove road until it joins a stretch of Offa’s Dyke Path, a national trail.  As if a brief Mozart bagatelle briefly overlapped a Mahler Symphony.  That great path down the eastern border of Wales takes me into Knighton (Tref-y-Clawdd – Town on the Dyke) joining Glyndwr’s Way.  Appropriately it is one of a hundred places in the UK designated with “Walkers are Welcome” status.