About Hay-on-Wye
The history, geography, and character of Hay-on-Wye.
Hay-on-Wye is Hay to everyone who uses it, and Y Gelli Gandryll in Welsh. It is a small market town in Powys, on the Wye and on the border with Herefordshire, and its addresses carry an HR3 postcode from the Hereford postal area, which is why a bookshop on Lion Street can be listed as in Powys by one directory and in Hereford by the next. It is known for second-hand books, for the festival at the end of May, and for the Black Mountains above it.
History & Heritage
The book town
Hay's identity is its bookshops, and the town's own directory sorts them by what they sell: crime at Murder and Mayhem and Christie and Doyle on Lion Street, science fiction and fantasy at Bookshop 451 in High Town, natural history at C. Arden on Forest Road, and the big general stocks at Richard Booth's Bookshop and the Hay Cinema Bookshop. Richard Booth died in 2019. Counts of how many shops the town has vary widely between sources, so none is given here.
The castle
Hay Castle is Grade I listed. The Hay Castle Trust won a National Lottery Heritage Fund grant in 2016, began restoration in 2018, and opened the castle to the public on 26 May 2022, the first day of that year's festival. It is run as a centre for arts, literature and learning.
The hills
South of the town the land climbs into the Black Mountains, inside Bannau Brycheiniog National Park. The Offa's Dyke Path, the 177-mile National Trail along the border, comes down into Hay off the ridge: the National Trail gives the Pandy to Hay leg as 17.5 miles, about 11 of them along the ridge to Hay Bluff, with the route's high point at about 700 metres on Hatterrall Ridge.