For many years, one of the favourite walks out of Aberystwyth was along Plas Crug Avenue.

Before the town spread eastwards, this was open country. The avenue took people away from the busy streets and out towards Llanbadarn, with fields on either side and the hills beyond. Trees lined parts of the route and benches gave walkers somewhere to stop and take in the view.

By the early nineteenth century, it was already a well-known walk. For people living in the town, it offered a simple escape into the countryside without having to go very far at all.

Read more history on the Lost Voices of Aberystwyth
Read more history on the Lost Voices of Aberystwyth (Lost Voices of Aberystwyth)

But there was more to the avenue than met the eye.

It is believed to have followed the line of an old mill leat which carried water from the River Rheidol towards Aberystwyth's town mill. The mill itself is recorded as early as 1280, so people strolling along Plas Crug Avenue may have been following a route with roots stretching back many centuries.

The area also played a practical part in the life of the town. Springs near Plas Crug were used during the severe drought of 1844, when water was pumped towards Aberystwyth at a time when a reliable supply was far from guaranteed.

But there was one feature of the walk that must have caught the eye more than anything else.

In the distance stood Plas Crug.

It was an unusual building, a stone house with a square battlemented tower rising above the surrounding fields. From the avenue it looked almost like a small castle, and it is easy to understand why so many stories grew up around it.

For generations, people believed Plas Crug had links with the medieval princes of Wales.

Some identified it with the old “Palace of the Rheidol”, while others connected the site with Owain Glyndŵr, whose forces took Aberystwyth Castle in the early 15th century.

There was also a long-standing belief that Plas Crug may have occupied the site of Aber￾rheidol Castle, a Norman stronghold built around 1158 by Roger Fitz Richard and destroyed in 1164 by Rhys ap Gruffudd, the Lord Rhys.

How much of this can ever be proved is another matter, but these were not modern inventions. The stories had already become attached to the place more than two hundred years ago. In 1808, a visitor described an old fortified mansion standing on a mound and surrounded by what appeared to be a moat.

By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Plas Crug belonged to the Nanteos estate and the Powell family. It was sold to Aberystwyth Corporation in 1873, while the avenue continued to be used by generations of townspeople.

That landscape is difficult to imagine now. The fields were gradually swallowed by the expanding town, and Plas Crug itself survived until 1967, when the old house and tower were demolished. Ysgol Plascrug now stands in the area.

The avenue is still there, but the building that once made the walk so distinctive has disappeared.

But for generations of Aberystwyth people, that walk along the avenue was part of everyday life — a familiar path out of town, with the old tower waiting ahead. They could never have imagined a time when both the fields and the house would disappear.

Yet perhaps that is why places like Plas Crug still matter. Not because every story about them can be proved, but because they remind us that the places we pass every day once belonged to other lives and to another Aberystwyth.