The Black and White Trail
North-west Herefordshire is well known for the black wood framed buildings with white panels within villages with fascinating histories. The Black and White Trail was developed in 1987 to encourage tourists to visit this area. It forms a 40 mile triangle between Leominster, Kington and Eardisley, visiting the best examples of these picturesque villages. Each village has its own character with churches, pubs, tea-rooms and craft shops. Although the timber framed buildings date back to Domesday the black and white colour scheme is probably Victorian in origin. Originally the timbers would have been unstained natural oak and the panels between would have reflected the colour of the local clay.
Eardisley
Eardisley is 4.5 miles south of the centre of Kington and has several timber framed buildings in the main street. Recent dendrochronology work on some of the beams have indicated that parts date back to the 14th Century and the font in St Mary’s Church dates to about 1150. One of the timber framed buildings has recently been restored in natural colours. Eardisley was once a terminus for the Hay Railway, an early Welsh narrow gauge horse tramway which linked the village to Brecon. Later this was joined to the Kington Tramway. These transported goods and freight. There were no official passenger services.
In addition to the church, the active community is served by a school, a fire station, village hall and two pubs (The Tram Inn and the New Strand), the latter contains the post office. The cache is accessed through the car park of the New Strand so be aware of moving vehicles especially if you are with children or dogs. The owners are aware of the cache. Please take care if you have to negotiate parked cars.
This cache is not part of the Black and White Series by Andicap but can be done in conjunction with those caches. If anyone would like to add caches in other villages on the Black and White Trail to this one, that would be great and I suggest that you follow this format to build them into a series. I don’t live in this area but visit Eardisley regularly.