TALGARTH  , a decayed

market town in Breconshire, South Wales, situated on the Ennig near its junction with the Llynfi (a tributary of the Wye), with a station on the joint line of the Cambrian and Midland companies from Brecon to Three Cocks Junction (22 M . N.N.E., but in Talgarth parish) . The population of the whole parish (which measures 12,294 acres) was 1466 in 1901 . The church of St Gwendoline, restored in 1873, is in Perpendicular style, with an embattled tower restored in 1898 . The Baptists, Congregationalists and Calvinistic Methodists have each a chapel in the town, and there is also a Congregational church at Tredwestan, founded in 1662 . About 1 m . S.W. is Trevecca, where Rowel Harris, one of the founders of Welsh Methodism, was born in 1713, and where in 1752 he established a communistic religious " family " of about a hundred persons; their representatives in 1842 handed over the property to the Welsh Calvinistic Methodist connexion, who in that year opened there a theological college, and in 1874 added to it a Harris memorial chapel . In r906 the college was removed to Aberystwyth, and the buildings are now used by the Connexion as a preparatory school for ministerial students . The fortified station of Dinas occupies the summit of a hill about 22 M . S.E. of Talgarth, and commands the mountain pass to Crickhowell and the eastern part of the vale of Usk . Its castle, built on the site of an earlier British fortress, was destroyed (according to Leland) by the inhabitants to prevent its falling into the hands of Glendower . The town was in the manor of English Talgarth, there being also a manor of Welsh Talgarth, in which Welsh laws prevailed .