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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John Davies of Erglodd (1821–1887): The Quiet Power of Faithful Service
History usually remembers the preacher whose sermons appeared in print, the politician whose speeches entered parliamentary record, or the benefactor whose name was carved…
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Tea and Waterfalls: John and Jane Waters of the Llyfnant Valley
During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, visitors began arriving in the Llyfnant Valley carrying railway tickets, walking sticks and expectations formed by…
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Esgair Llywelyn and the Last Prince of Wales: A Montgomeryshire Family Legend
High in the Montgomeryshire uplands, above the quieter reaches of the Dyfi valley, stands an abandoned farmhouse known as Esgair Llywelyn, Llywelyn’s Ridge. It…
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Saving the Soul of Wales: Why We Must Preserve Welsh Family and Chapel Records
There are moments when the loss of history is dramatic. A building burns, a monument is demolished, or a collection is dispersed at auction.…