The Elan Valley: Birmingham's Reservoirs Under a Dark Sky

The Elan Valley is where Birmingham's water comes from. The Birmingham Corporation Water Act of 1892 let the city buy the whole catchment; thousands of navvies and their families lived in a village of wooden huts, where Elan Village stands now, while the first four dams went up at the turn of the century, and the fifth, Claerwen, was opened by Elizabeth II in 1952, one of her first official engagements as queen. The water still runs to Frankley Reservoir in Birmingham by gravity alone — the Elan aqueduct drops 52 metres over 73 miles, at a gradient of 1 in 2,300, and the water takes a day and a half to two days to arrive. The valley covers 70 square miles of lake and hill west of Rhayader, and since 2015 it has been an International Dark Sky Park.