Administrative Boundary of Powys

About Powys

Powys is a principal area in mid-Wales, the largest in Wales by area — encompassing much of the historic counties of Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire, and Brecknockshire — yet one of the most sparsely populated parts of the United Kingdom. Covering approximately 5,181 square kilometres, Powys had a population of approximately 133,000 at the 2022 Census, with Llandrindod Wells as its administrative centre. Powis Castle and the Elan Valley Powis Castle, near Welshpool, began as a medieval Welsh fortress before being transformed into an opulent aristocratic residence; it houses one of the finest collections of art, furniture, and artefacts relating to British colonial India in the country, assembled largely by Clive of India and his descendants, and its dramatic Italianate terraced gardens, laid out from the 1680s, are ranked among the finest in Britain. The Elan Valley, in the west of the county, contains a chain of reservoirs and dams built between 1893 and 1904 to supply fresh water to Birmingham, over 117 kilometres away; the scale and Victorian engineering ambition of the scheme transformed the valley into what is often called the "Welsh Lake District." Hay-on-Wye and Brecon Beacons Hay-on-Wye, on the border with England, has been known since the 1960s as the "Town of Books," home to dozens of secondhand and antiquarian bookshops, and hosts the Hay Festival each summer, an internationally renowned literary festival once described by former US President Bill Clinton as "the Woodstock of the mind." The Brecon Beacons National Park, covering much of southern Powys, is dominated by Pen y Fan, at 886 metres the highest peak in South Wales, and remains one of Britain's most popular upland walking destinations. GIS and Boundary Data The administrative boundary of Powys Council is available for free download in GeoJSON and KML formats, sourced from the OS Open Geography portal (Crown copyright 2024). Compatible with QGIS, ArcGIS, Mapbox, and Google Earth, the dataset supports rural land use planning, reservoir and water infrastructure research, literary tourism mapping, and demographic analysis across the Powys council area.

📍 Administrative boundary of Powys county