Think of quarries and Dolgoch, Treflach and Whitehaven come to mind, however the landscape is pox marked by a cottage industry that was a necessity to makes ends meet not that long ago.
The old farm houses and sheds are all local grey stone as are the walls that line most boundaries – the sand came from a sand hole at Treflach Hall junction.
The famous Thomas Savin was a local lad who carved out a career in railway building and made Oswestry the major terminal for Wales. At his zenith he owned Treflach Farm so it is by no coincidence all the local lanes have been cut into the countryside to help the industrial traffic before he built his railway line from Coed-Y -Go to Llynclys. The bridge at Brook House is a testament and monument to a great man who made things happen for the greater good at his own expense in the end.
In my youth I was part of a team who stone picked fields that had been ploughed at Treflach Hall -hundreds of tons of stone was used to fill many of the holes and were put back to how they used to be then covered with topsoil.
One particular hole at Gron-Wen was stone as hard as Criggion; a volcanic igneous basalt that was used to make mill stones to grind local corn. Just a field now but a metal detector I have commissioned to get the land to talk to me has found it a very interesting location. Amongst other things a rare lead smoking pipe as opposed to a clay pipe of farm workers was found showing us how we used to live and work.