Montgomeryshire History

Montgomeryshire is a county best understood through connections: between upland farms and market towns, chapels and schools, family networks and migration, local enterprise and national change. My own work within the historic county is deliberately more focused. Its centre of gravity is Machynlleth and the surrounding rural country, particularly Llanwrin, Caeadda and the Llyfnant Valley, where family history, farming, chapel culture and community memory can be followed in unusual depth.

This is therefore not intended as an encyclopaedic history of every part of Montgomeryshire. It is a developing collection rooted most strongly in the western part of the county, around Machynlleth and its rural hinterland, while also following the people, institutions and transport networks that connect those communities with places such as Newtown, Llandinam and the Severn Valley. The emphasis is social and biographical: how people lived, worked, worshipped, moved, remembered and adapted as Montgomeryshire changed from the eighteenth century into the modern period.

Jump to: Where to begin · Machynlleth and Llanwrin · Newtown and the Severn Valley · Religion and education · Railways and landscapes · Politics · About the project · Books

Machynlleth and the rural heart of this project

Machynlleth and the countryside around it provide the principal geographical focus of this project. The farms and communities of Llanwrin, Caeadda and the Llyfnant Valley offer a particularly rich way into the history of rural Montgomeryshire because they bring together land, kinship, tenancy, religion, education, migration and memory. From that local base, the essays widen outward where individual lives and wider developments demand it.

The county beyond this western core remains important, but it is approached selectively. Newtown appears through enterprise, reform and my own later connection with the Royal Welsh Warehouse, Llandinam through the Davies family and the infrastructure of industrial Wales, and the wider county through Nonconformity, transport and public life. The result is a history built outward from a defined landscape rather than an attempt to cover Montgomeryshire evenly.

Where to begin

These six essays provide the strongest introduction to Montgomeryshire, balancing the rural world at the centre of this project with the county’s industrial, commercial and social transformations.

• Caeadda, Llanwrin: Three Centuries of Farming in the Montgomeryshire Uplands, a detailed history of one upland farm, following the Davies family from tenant farming to ownership and the Pughe succession.
• The Llyfnant Valley: Farming, Waterfalls, Tourism and the Waters Family, the broadest introduction to the rural society, family continuity and changing economy at the heart of this research.
• Esgair Llewelyn, using one upland farmhouse to connect architecture, genealogy, women’s work, farming, religion and community memory.
• David Davies of Llandinam, for railways, coal, docks and the way Victorian enterprise connected rural Montgomeryshire with industrial Wales.
• When an English City Drowned a Welsh Village, for displacement, municipal power and the remaking of Llanwddyn for Lake Vyrnwy.
• Robert Owen of Newtown, for industry, social reform and the extraordinary international reach of a life that began in the Severn Valley.

Machynlleth, Llanwrin and the Llyfnant Valley

This is the strongest and most sustained strand of my Montgomeryshire research. Much of the area’s history survives at local level, in farmhouses, chapels, lanes, family papers, graveyards and the long memory of rural communities around Machynlleth, Llanwrin, Caeadda and the Llyfnant Valley. These essays use that evidence to reconstruct the social structures that gave upland life its continuity and the pressures that gradually transformed it.

• The White Horse Hotel, Machynlleth: Fire, Farming Families and Life on Maengwyn Street, an account of the White Horse on Maengwyn Street, the 1911 rebuilding and the career of former Ceniarth farmer Evan Owen and landlady Elizabeth Owen.
• Thomas Davies of Penlan and Gwernstablau (1864–1930), my great-uncle, a Llanwrin-born sheep farmer whose Penlan and Gwernstablau holdings, public offices and family links illuminate life around Machynlleth.
• John Pugh of Glyncaerig (1834–1912): From Farm Labourer’s Son to Montgomeryshire Landowner, a biography of a farm labourer’s son who became the proprietor of Glyncaerig, linking Tymawr, Alltddu, Glandwr and the farming families around Llanwrin.
• Machynlleth Fairs and Markets: Trade, Farming and Rural Life in Victorian and Edwardian Montgomeryshire, the medieval market, Victorian livestock fairs, tolls, town streets and the trade linking Machynlleth with the upland farming communities of western Montgomeryshire.
• Owen Owen (1847–1910): The Montgomeryshire Draper Who Built a Retail Empire, from a Machynlleth draper’s beginnings to a retail enterprise extending across Britain.
• The Ceniarth Farm Dispute of 1900, Evan Owen’s 1900 case against the Ceniarth Hall landlord, examining rents, timber damage, compensation and tenant farming near Machynlleth.
• Caeadda, Llanwrin: Three Centuries of Farming in the Montgomeryshire Uplands, the farm at the centre of this research, from early occupants and Victorian agriculture to family inheritance and modern hill farming.
• Gwen Jones of Caeadda (1841–1926): A Welsh Farming Matriarch, the life of a woman whose work and family responsibilities illuminate the demands of upland farming households.
• Owen Jones Davies (1875–1958): From Caeadda to Wood River, Alberta, the life of my great-uncle, from Caeadda and Penlan to farming, chapel life and Welsh music at Wood River in Alberta.
• Esgair Llewelyn: A Medieval Welsh Farmhouse and the Social History of a Llanwrin Family, the surviving farmhouse, its occupants and the long social history of a Montgomeryshire upland household.
• The Llyfnant Valley: Farming, Waterfalls, Tourism and the Waters Family, the farming families and changing rural economy of the valley, from everyday upland life to the arrival of visitors drawn by its waterfalls and scenery.
• Esgair Llewelyn and the Last Prince of Wales: A Montgomeryshire Family Legend, the family tradition concerning Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, considered alongside the surviving architectural and historical evidence.
• The Tragedy of Maescelyn: The Jenkins Family, 1906–1913, the deaths of Elizabeth and Harriet Jenkins at Maescelyn in 1906, the loss of the farm and the dispersal of four children.
• Voices from the Uplands: Why I Wrote It and Why It Matters, a reflection on family history as a record of Montgomeryshire rural culture and community memory.
• Tuberculosis at Ceniarth: The Disease That Devastated a Montgomeryshire Farming Family, 1888–1894, a documented account of tuberculosis at Ceniarth Farm near Machynlleth, where five members of the Owen family died between 1888 and 1894.
• Llanwrin: A Montgomeryshire Village, Its People and My Family’s History, a parish history bringing together the medieval church, rural occupations, village institutions and the many Davies and Jones ancestors buried in the churchyard.

Newtown and the Severn Valley

Newtown and the Severn Valley provide the principal counterpoint to the rural west of the county. Here industrial development, retail enterprise, transport and reform created connections extending far beyond Montgomeryshire. Nearby Llandinam adds another dimension through the Davies family and the infrastructure of Victorian and twentieth-century Wales.

• Robert Owen of Newtown (1771–1858), industry, social reform and the making of the New Moral World.
• Sir Pryce Pryce-Jones (1834–1920), the Newtown draper whose mail-order business reached an international market.
• David Davies of Llandinam (1818–1890), railways, coal, docks and the infrastructure of Victorian Wales.
• David Davies, 1st Baron Davies of Llandinam (1880–1944), wealth, philanthropy, public service and international affairs.

Religion, education and Nonconformity

Nonconformity shaped Montgomeryshire far beyond Sunday worship. Chapels, Sunday Schools and denominational networks influenced education, temperance, social mobility, public speaking and community organisation, particularly within the rural society from which many of the people studied here emerged.

• Ann Griffiths (1776–1805) of Dolwar Fach, one of Montgomeryshire’s most important religious and literary figures.
• John Davies of Erglodd (1821–1887): “Apostol y Plant”, the Llanwrin-born religious worker whose service to children, education and the chapel community illustrates the wider influence of Welsh Nonconformity.
• Trevor Owen Davies (1895–1966), connecting a Montgomeryshire farming childhood with Nonconformity, education and social mobility.
• Welsh Nonconformity, the wider guide to revival, chapel culture, preaching and religious authority across Wales.

Railways, roads and changing landscapes

Montgomeryshire’s apparent remoteness never meant isolation. Railways and roads altered access to markets, work and services, while new infrastructure changed the relationship between rural communities and the rest of Wales and Britain.

• The Mid-Wales Railway: The Lost Route Through the Heart of Wales, the railway running south from Llanidloes through Radnorshire, and its importance for rural trade, travel and communications.
• The Tylwch Railway Disaster of 1899, a fatal collision on the line south of Llanidloes, illustrating the hazards and responsibilities of operating a single-track railway.
• Llanwddyn and the Making of Lake Vyrnwy, showing how water engineering, compulsory acquisition and metropolitan demand transformed a rural valley and displaced an established community.

Politics and public life

Montgomeryshire’s political history forms a separate strand within the wider collection, connecting landed influence, local government, Liberal traditions and changing electoral politics with the communities and institutions from which they developed.

• Clement Davies (1884–1962), Liberal leader and long-serving MP for Montgomeryshire.
• Arthur Charles Humphreys-Owen (1836–1905), land, Liberalism and public duty in Victorian Montgomeryshire.
• The Election That Broke an Inheritance, examining the 2010 Montgomeryshire election in the context of a long Liberal tradition.
• The Decline of Liberal Wales, placing Montgomeryshire within a wider history of Welsh Liberalism.

About this Montgomeryshire history project

My connection with Montgomeryshire is both ancestral and personal. Part of my family had been rooted in the historic county for generations, particularly in the farming communities around Llanwrin, Caeadda, the Llyfnant Valley and Machynlleth. My grandfather, Griffith Llewelyn Davies, was born at Caeadda in 1888 and spent the first forty years of his life within that Montgomeryshire farming world.

I began researching these families in the mid-1990s. What started as an attempt to understand my own ancestry gradually developed into a much broader study of Montgomeryshire society. Following generations through census returns, wills, parish and chapel registers, newspapers, family photographs and estate records raised wider questions about farming, migration, religion, education, social mobility and the relationship between isolated upland communities and towns such as Machynlleth and Newtown.

My relationship with Newtown is also personal. Growing up in Mid Wales, I remember visiting the Royal Welsh Warehouse, the great Pryce Jones building, during the late 1980s and 1990s. Years later I returned to the building professionally, working there between 2013 and 2015. My work on Montgomeryshire has since ranged from individual farming families and upland houses to Newtown’s entrepreneurs, Nonconformity, transport and social change.

Further reading in book form

Voices from the Uplands develops the history of a Montgomeryshire farming family into a wider study of rural society, kinship, chapel culture, migration and memory.

Old Llyfnant Valley Farming Families preserves detailed genealogical and local evidence for families across the Llyfnant Valley and communities around Llanwrin and Machynlleth.

The Davies Caeadda Family reconstructs the long history of one Montgomeryshire farming family and the network of neighbouring households to which it was connected.

The research base for this project reaches back to the mid-1990s. Over the years I accumulated a large body of genealogical notes, archival references, photographs, family papers and local historical material relating to Montgomeryshire, especially the Machynlleth, Llanwrin and Llyfnant Valley area. Much of it remained unpublished in research files. I am now revisiting that material, checking and expanding it where necessary, and using it as the foundation for the essays published here.

A developing online history of Montgomeryshire

This guide concentrates on Machynlleth and the rural communities of western Montgomeryshire, extending to Newtown, Llandinam and county-wide themes where they illuminate the wider social history of the area.

Related guides include Welsh Rural History, Notable People of Mid Wales, Family History & Genealogy and Welsh Nonconformity.

For historical, heritage or research enquiries, Contact Antony.