Tag: Powys
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Rhodri Mawr and the First Architecture of Welsh Power
Introduction, Beyond Legend Rhodri Mawr, who died in 878, stands at a structural turning point in Welsh history. He was neither the first king in Wales nor the ruler of a unified nation in any modern sense. Yet during his lifetime the scale at which Welsh politics operated changed perceptibly. What had been a mosaic…
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Voices from the Uplands, why I wrote it, and why it matters now
Voices from the Uplands: The Davies Family and the Soul of Rural Wales is, in the simplest sense, a book about my own ancestors, the Davies family of Caeadda, Llanwrin. But I did not write it to produce another neatly ordered pedigree, nor to add one more family tree to the growing pile of genealogical summaries…
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The Mid Wales Railway, The Lost Spine of a Divided Nation
To understand the Mid Wales Railway properly, you start with the landscape itself. Mid Wales is not flat, and it is not forgiving. Rivers cut deep valleys, hills force settlements into pockets of habitability, and the human geography is defined by market towns and dispersed farms rather than industrial conurbations. The economy was pastoral and…
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The Land of Saints
A journey through the sacred canon of Wales To understand Welsh identity you must first accept a simple truth: Wales is a country whose ground is saturated with sacred memory. Not sacred in the abstract, not merely in the language of church and doctrine, but sacred in the way wells are named, in the way…
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Teenage Years on the Doldowlod Hall Estate
The mid-1990s were years of transition in rural Wales. Farming incomes were under strain, country houses were redefining their purpose, and politics in Britain seemed poised between the certainties of Thatcherism and the coming landslide of New Labour. For me, those years were marked most vividly by the Doldowlod Hall estate on the upper reaches…
Antony David Davies FRSA FRAS AFRHistS FIoL MCMI 