Essays
Explore curated subject guides, browse by category, or search the complete archive of historical essays, biographies and reflections.
Featured Subject Guides
These curated guides bring connected essays together and place them within a wider historical context.
Llandrindod Wells History
The spa town, its mineral waters, hotels, institutions, entrepreneurs and changing social world.
Welsh Rural History
Farming communities, upland landscapes, working lives, continuity and change across rural Wales.
Family History & Genealogy
Lives reconstructed through family papers, census records, archives, newspapers and genealogical evidence.
Notable People of Mid Wales
Entrepreneurs, reformers, politicians, clergy, sporting figures and community leaders whose influence reached far beyond mid Wales.
Welsh Nonconformity
Chapel culture, preaching, faith, authority and the religious structures of Welsh community life.
Country Houses & Estates
Families, servants, inheritance, landed influence and the social worlds built around houses and estates.
Victorian & Edwardian Wales
Industry, enterprise, faith, civic culture, country estates, rural society and the transformations that reshaped Wales across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Third Sector Commentary
Alongside the historical subject guides, a separate strand brings together writing on charity retail, reuse, Phoenix Community Furniture, governance, organisational culture and the changing voluntary sector.
Browse by Category
All Essays
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The Waters That Built a Town: How the Mineral Springs Created Llandrindod Wells
There are towns whose origins can still be read quite easily in the landscape. Some grew beneath castles, others around markets, ports, mines or…
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William Jones of Glandwr Hall, 1792–1882: From Dolgellau to the City of London and Back Again
The nineteenth century created many different forms of success. Some were spectacular and immediately visible, expressed through political office, industrial wealth or military distinction.…
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Arthur Owen Jones: The Welsh Cricketer Who Captained England
There are some historical figures whose names survive because each generation retells their story, and others whose reputations gradually retreat into the footnotes. Arthur…
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Mary Anne Wilkins Lucas, Later Middleton Evans: The Woman Who Helped Give Llandrindod Wells Its Hospital
Old photographs have a habit of preserving a face while allowing almost everything around it to disappear. A sitter who once belonged to a…
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Tom Norton of Llandrindod Wells: The Man Behind the Automobile Palace
There are some people whose lives become so closely woven into the story of a place that it becomes difficult to separate one from…
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Doldowlod Hall: Industry, Landscape and the Making of a Radnorshire Estate
There are country houses which dominate their surroundings and others which seem to belong to them. Doldowlod is one of the latter. Travelling south…
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The Monks’ Trod: A Medieval Road Through the Cambrian Mountains
There are places in Wales where history survives because later generations found them useful, and others where it survives because the modern world largely…
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The Rock Park Hotel, Llandrindod Wells: Two Centuries of Reinvention
On 10 October 1865, the railway finally reached Llandrindod Wells. A special train brought visitors into a place which was still more common and…
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The Pump House Hotel, Llandrindod Wells: The Building That Made the Victorian Spa
Some hotels belong to the history of a town. The Pump House belonged to the reason the town existed at all. Long before Llandrindod…
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Nancy Laurie (1840–1915): The Governess Behind a Shrewsbury Photograph
A named Victorian photograph is a small act of resistance against oblivion. The woman in this carte de visite is shown in profile, her…
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The Gwalia Hotel, Llandrindod Wells: Its People and Afterlife
Some buildings sit quietly in the landscape, fixed to the moment that produced them. The Gwalia never behaved like that. It moved from one…
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Ye Wells, Llandrindod Wells: The Many Lives of a Spa Landmark
Ye Wells has been part of Llandrindod Wells for so long that people barely look at it now. It sits there on Spa Road…