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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David Gibson-Watt (1918–2002) of Doldowlod: War, Politics and Welsh Unionism
Some political lives belong so completely to their period that they become difficult to understand once that period has passed. James David Gibson-Watt, later…
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Owen Owen (1847–1910): The Montgomeryshire Draper Who Built a Retail Empire
The history of nineteenth-century Wales is often told through coal, iron, slate, agriculture, Nonconformity and politics. Yet one of the most important changes of…
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David Davies (1818–1890) of Llandinam: The Sawyer Who Redrew the Map of Wales
Some nineteenth-century lives are so large that they can obscure the person who lived them. David Davies of Llandinam has become one of those…
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The Election That Broke an Inheritance: Montgomeryshire and the Liberal Defeat of 2010
For much of the twentieth century, Montgomeryshire provided one of the clearest surviving connections between modern party politics and the older culture of Liberal…
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Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920): The Newtown Draper Who Transformed the Geography of Shopping
Growing up in mid Wales, a trip to Newtown was a big thing, and especially a trip to “Pryce Jones”. By the late 1980s…
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The Decline of Liberal Wales: A Political Inheritance Without a Party
For more than half a century, Liberalism was the dominant language of Welsh public life. It united Nonconformist religion, popular education, land reform, temperance,…
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Trevor Owen Davies (1895–1966): From Welsh Farm Boy to Christ Church, Oxford
Trevor Owen Davies was born at Caeadda in the parish of Llanwrin on 20 November 1895. From this Montgomeryshire farm in the Llyfnant Valley,…
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When an English City Drowned a Welsh Village: Llanwddyn and the Making of Lake Vyrnwy
During the hot summer of 2018, falling water levels at Lake Vyrnwy exposed fragments of an earlier landscape. Masonry appeared along the reservoir’s margins.…
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Voices from the Uplands: Why I Wrote It and Why It Matters
Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales began with my own ancestors, the Davies family of Caeadda in…
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The Treachery of 1847: The Blue Books and the Making of Welsh Inferiority
In 1847, three substantial reports on education in Wales were presented to Parliament. Bound in the blue covers commonly used for official publications, they…
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The Mid-Wales Railway: The Lost Route Through the Heart of Wales
Some railway closures removed a branch from the map. The closure of the Mid-Wales Railway did something more serious. It broke one of the…
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William Williams Pantycelyn (1717–1791): The Voice of the Welsh Methodist Revival
The Welsh Methodist Revival was carried by more than preaching. Daniel Rowland drew immense congregations through the force of his sermons. Howell Harris organised…