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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Howell Harris (1714–1773): The Making of Evangelical Wales
On 21 July 1773, Howell Harris died at Trefeca, the Breconshire home from which, nearly forty years earlier, he had begun carrying religious revival…
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Daniel Rowland (1713–1790) of Llangeitho: Preaching, Revival and Religious Authority in Wales
In October 1790, Daniel Rowland was buried at Llangeitho, the Cardiganshire village that his preaching had transformed into one of the great religious centres…
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John Cartwright Jones (1831–1875): Clerical Life, Family Ambition and the Glandwr Inheritance
John Cartwright Jones never became a bishop, a celebrated theologian or a national figure. His clerical career was spent in three comparatively small English…
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David Jenkins (1850–1891): A Farm Labourer’s Life and Death in Rural Wales
On the afternoon of 13 January 1891, David Jenkins was carrying manure to a field at Camlan, near Dinas Mawddwy. It was ordinary winter…
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Hugh Wynn Wilding-Jones (1896–1918): Glandwr’s Lost Heir and the Road to Dojran
Seven days after Lieutenant Hugh Wynn Wilding-Jones died in a military hospital near Salonika, Bulgaria signed an armistice and withdrew from the First World…
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George Roberts Shorto (1836–1905): Crimean War Veteran and Town Clerk of Exeter
When George Roberts Shorto died in August 1905, Exeter marked his passing with an imposing civic funeral. The Mayor, magistrates, councillors and representatives of…
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Herbert George Flaxman Spurrell (1877–1918): Science, Exploration and a Life of Exceptional Promise
Few members of my extended family moved so confidently across the intellectual and geographical boundaries of the Edwardian world as Herbert George Flaxman Spurrell.…
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Off the Rails: Why I Wrote the Story of Alfred Jenkins
Off the Rails: The Story of Crewe Steam Train Driver Alfred Jenkins began not as a publishing project, but as an act of recovery.…
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Richard Emmett: From Salford Poverty to the British Army and Crewe
When Richard Emmett died in Crewe in 1906, there was little in the circumstances of his death to suggest the geographical breadth of the…
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The Uncrowned Kings: How the Preacher Ruled Victorian Wales
Picture a rural Welsh chapel on a Sunday evening in the later nineteenth century. Outside, rain moves across the hills and darkness has closed…
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William Halse Gatty Jones (1825–1897): From Gold-Rush Melbourne to the Hills of Merioneth
The life of my first cousin four times removed, William Halse Gatty Jones, crossed two hemispheres and several distinct Victorian worlds. Known within the…
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Doldowlod Hall Estate: My Teenage Years, 1995–1997
Between 1995 and 1997, when I was passing through the uncertain territory between childhood and adulthood, the Doldowlod estate became part of the landscape…