Before you set out

Mid Wales weather turns quickly and mobile signal is patchy to non-existent in most of the valleys on this site. Two things worth doing every time: tell someone where you are headed, and print or screenshot the route before you leave the house. Every walk page here prints onto one sheet of A4.

Boots rather than trainers for anything above the easy mark. Most of these routes cross working farmland, so gates get closed behind you and dogs go on leads near stock. Between March and July there are ground-nesting birds on the open hills, which is the real reason for the lead, not the sheep.

What these guides are, and are not

Every walk here gives you the practical facts, a map, an outline of where the route goes and what to expect. What none of them give you is turn-by-turn instructions. That is deliberate. Paths change, stiles rot, waymarkers fall off gateposts, and a set of directions written once and never revisited is worse than no directions at all on a hillside in November.

Take the relevant OS Explorer sheet. For most of Powys that means OL12, OL13, 200, 201, 214 or 239. The paper map does not run out of battery and works in the rain, which is more than can be said for the phone in your pocket.

Rights of way

Powys has more than twelve thousand public rights of way, and the county council is responsible for keeping them open. If you find a blocked path, a broken stile or a missing waymarker, report it to them. They cannot fix what nobody tells them about, and on the quieter paths in this county you may well be the only person who notices for months.

The hills are not benign

Pen y Fan looks like a walk in the park from the car park at Pont ar Daf and kills people most years. The open commons of Radnorshire are featureless in cloud. The Berwyn and Pumlumon have almost no paths and very few landmarks. Walks marked demanding or strenuous on this site need proper boots, waterproofs, food, water and the ability to use a map and compass when the visibility goes.