Episode 0 – Introduction

British History has been covered in many ways, on podcasts, documentaries, and blogs. But I want to look at things differently. I want to take the villages, towns and cities of Britain and Ireland, and talk about history through the eyes of the people living there. Who were they? What impact did each place have on these islands? What events happened in their streets?

In the old days, before Google Maps, you had to figure out your directions from a paper map. In the back of the map was an index with all the place names from A to Z, and you’d need to plan your route carefully as the map wouldn’t give you a time estimate or three different routes to get there. I’ve got my own road map of Britain, the AA 2014 Great Britain and Ireland map, from whose index of place names I will be working. Not every settlement in Britain is listed – a few small hamlets will be missed out, sadly, but there is plenty to be getting on with.

Episode 71 – Aberlady

‘Aberlady does not appear to have been ever the scene of any very memorable event, nor is it famous in history as the birth-place, or place of residence, of any very eminent man’

Rev John Smith, 1845

I was going to put this out earlier, but I got distracted by computer games and also a new purchase – the Marvellous Map of Great British Place Names, which I found via a Facebook ad. It’s the first time I’ve ever deliberately clicked on a Facebook ad to buy something. From the mildly amusing Great Snoring, to the sniggeringly dodgy Greatbottom Flash, this map not only shows interesting place names but also tells a little bit of the history of some of the locations. It even has a guide to the meanings of place names, with ‘Aber’ of course at the top.

East of Edinburgh, in the area of East Lothian along the coast of the Firth of Forth, Aberlady was an important port town prior to the rise of Leith. Today it’s a quiet village next to the golfing town of Gullane. It’s not far from where I live, but thanks to Covid-19 I can’t make it out there to take photographs. Once they let us travel again, I’ll be sure to go out there and capture the sights.

The name of the town comes from the former name of the West Peffer Burn, which was either ‘less’ (‘glide smoothly’) or ‘loss’ (meaning ‘peeling away’ or ‘decomposing’). And despite what the local priest had to say, Aberlady does have an interesting history going back thousands of years.

Around four thousand years ago, a bronze age settlement was founded near Craigielaw Golf Club (which as far as we know wasn’t there at the time) and artifacts belonging to the beaker people have even been discovered here. The beaker people are notable for being buried with a specific design of pottery, found across European cultures. Archaeologists believe that this was more of a cultural spread than the travel of populations, in the same way that today a fashion trend might start in one location, and then people in another location would copy the same trend. For whatever reason, this pottery design was pretty cool in 2000 BCE.

Later artifacts have been found dating to the iron age, when the Romans arrived in Britain – Aberlady would have been just inside the most northern part of the empire, at the Antonine Wall. And after the Romans came new settlers, the Anglo-Saxons. This area was part of the kingdom of Bernicia, which was founded in the 6th Century. Bernicia was later conquered by the Northumbrians.

The Northumbrians are noted for their early adoption of Christianity – one of the most famous Northumbrians is the poet and writer Bede – and evidence of the adoption of this new religion by the people of Aberlady can be seen in the fragment of carved stone cross discovered in the manse garden, dating back to 700 CE. This fragment can now be found in the National Museum of Scotland, in Edinburgh.

The cross has a typical Northumbrian design – scroll work, animals and angels appear on the carving. At nearby Abercorn very similar crosses have been found, which experts believe were made by the same stonemason. One feature of it has four seabirds with their legs forming a Celtic knot. This same image is found carved into the Abercorn crosses, and also drawn in the Lindisfarne Gospels that date to the same time. Linisfarne – the Holy Island – was the spiritual centre of Christianity in Northumbria. The museum’s website has an image of this carving on it.

In 973 the Lothians – including modern East Lothian – were annexed from England to Scotland. It is another two hundred years after this that we find the first mention of Aberlady in a document, three thousand years after it was first inhabited.

In 1149 King David I of Scotland confirmed Aberlady as a port in a Royal Charter, and in 1170 a local farm was granted to the monks of Dryburgh by the Bishop of Dunkeld – Aberlady was part of the Diocese of Dunkeld. Both Dunkeld and Dryburgh are a long way from the village, but perhaps its port status made it advantageous to hold land there.

And in 1221, at long last, we have our first mention of a person living in Aberlady. His name was Gilbert, and he was the local chaplain. His name appears as a witness to a document. Thus Aberlady becomes for us a town of living people, with a bustling port, inhabitants both religious and secular, going about their daily lives.

A new religious order was rising in the Catholic church. We have previously encountered Cistercians and Benedictines. Today we’re meeting the Carmelites for the first time.

They were originally hermits, living on Mount Carmel in the Holy Land. Mount Carmel is said to be where the prophet Elijah held a ‘sacrifice-off’ with hundreds of prophets of the god Baal, to prove to the people of Israel which god they should follow. Each group of prophets was to make a sacrifice to their god, and pray to that god to set it alight.

First the prophets of Baal went, and they prayed and prayed to their god for hours, but the sacrifice did not light. Then it was Elijah’s turn. He soaked his sacrifice with water so that the whole thing of dead animal, wood and stone was dripping wet. Then he called on his god – YHWH – to light the sacrifice. According to the Bible, it lit instantly, consuming everything. Immediately the people of Israel abandoned Baal and worshiped YHWH instead.

So this being a holy site, it was understandably a place where religious hermits retreated from the world to contemplate their god and receive inspiration from him.

The twelfth century was a time of crusade in the Holy Land. Men of different religions fought each other for control of the area, each believing it to belong primarily to their religion. But they also travelled there for pilgrimage, and many pilgrims and crusaders found themselves drawn to Mount Carmel. In the early thirteenth century, a group of them went to the Abbot of Jerusalem and asked him for a rule, to set out how they would live their lives.

Thus in the Rule of St. Albert, the Camelites were formed. It set out for them a life of obedience, prayer, poverty and hard work. They had vows of silence and could not eat meat except when ill.

For some time they remained in the Holy Land, but in the middle of the thirteenth century they began to spread west, first in Cyprus and Sicily, and then in England and France. By the end of the century there would be over 150 Camelite houses across Europe. One of those houses was founded on November 30 1293 at Luffness, just to the north of modern Aberlady.

We know this date so precisely thanks to an agreement drawn up on that day – St. Andrew’s Day – ‘between Sir William Lindsay, son of the late Sir David Lindsay, and John, abbot of Newbattle’. Newbattle was a Cistercian Abbey. As payment for the land, William promised the abbey £20 per year, forever. As part of the deal, the monks of Newbattle would be praying for William and his family’s (including ancestors’ and descendants’) souls, as a way to make sure they’d have all their sins forgiven and go to heaven when they die. This was a common practice at the time. Some of the money was for providing good food for the monks of Luffness, but most was to be spent on the poor, providing them with clothing once a year on November 1st.

The Luffness church was on the north side of a square cloister, stretched east to west – a common orientation for churches, and you will find most old churches face in this direction so that the congregation face towards the rising sun. The other sides of the cloister contained the necessary rooms for the residents such as a kitchen, refectory and dormitories. Today only the ruins of the church remain, the rest having fallen away to nothing but a few bits of rubble.

In the church ruins we can find one of the most intriguing features of the building – a stone effigy of a knight, lying at rest. His identity is unknown, although he is believed to have been the founder of this church due to his position and the style of his outfit. There are two main candidates to who this could be.

According to local tradition this is ‘Bickerton’, a local lord who held the castle of Luffness in 1296. Indeed his descendants held Luffness until the mid-15th Century. A pathway from Aberlady to the area of the friary is called Bickerton’s Walk.

But the other candidate is Sir David Lindsay, father of the above-mentioned William Lindsay. The story goes that when he was on crusade in Egypt in the 1260s, he was injured and took refuge in a Carmelite friary. He died of his wounds, and the friars embalmed his body and returned it to Luffness, where they founded the friary.

We have no idea which of these is the real founder, or indeed if it was someone else entirely. But in either case the friary remained active in Aberlady until at least 1512, which is the last time it’s mentioned.

Around this time, Kilspindie Castle was built. Though ‘castle’ is quite a generous term for it, being little more than a small tower house. Today only a few stones survive. It was owned by Archibald Douglas of Kilspindie, a significant figure in Scottish royal history.

Archibald was the fourth son of Archibald Douglas, Fifth Earl of Angus. In 1513, at the battle of Flodden, two of the older sons died fighting alongside King James IV, who also fell. The Earl was then appointed as a councillor to James’s wife, Margaret Tudor, who was made regent of Scotland in place of her infant son, James V. But that appointment was short-lived, as the Earl died in 1513.

This was not, however, the end of the influence of the Earls of Angus on the Scottish monarchy. The sixth Earl, the fifth’s grandson, also called Archibald – married Margaret Tudor in the summer of the next year. This cemented the Douglases as the real power behind the throne.

Using his influence, the sixth Earl brought his uncle Archibald of Kilspindie into the royal circles. He was appointed Lord High Treasurer of Scotland, and was also appointed Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1519, 1521 and 1526 – the appointment was for one year. It seems the young king really liked this Archibald, and gave him the nickname ‘Graysteil’, after a popular ballad of the time.

The ballad’s hero, a knight, was an invincible strong man who becomes corrupted by black magic and is later slain by a sword given by a magical woman. It is suggested that the reason for this nickname is that Greysteil was dominated by his wife, a rich Edinburgh widow called Isobel Hopper.

James V did not live comfortably under the Douglases’ control, and in his mid-teens in 1528 he escaped while they were staying at Falkland Palace, riding to Stirling Castle. On discovering the escape, Greysteil fled after the king but was forbidden entry by the King’s Herald.

Now in control of his own destiny, James V had the Douglases condemned for treason and seized their lands at the September 1528 Scottish parliament. But of course the Douglases were not about to get themselves arrested – and killed – for treason and they fled to England.

They arrived at the river Tweed – marking the border between the countries – on 5 September 1528, and they stayed at Norham Castle under the Earl of Northumberland.

Greysteil had died in exile by 1536, and the Douglases were not forgiven until 1543. In that year, his and Isobel’s son – yet another Archibald – returned to reclaim his land, and would in turn be appointed Lord Provost of Edinburgh on three separate occasions.

Archibald’s descendant Patrick Douglas rebuilt the castle around 1600. When he died, it passed to his widow Alice, who married Alexander Hay. So around 1621 Kilspindie Castle passed into the Hays inheritance.

Aberlady was now thriving. The Firth of Forth was deep here even close to shore, so large ships could anchor nearby to easily offload goods. So in 1633, the same year that Charles I was crowned King of Scotland, Aberlady was officially recognised as the port of Haddington, much as Leith was the port of Edinburgh. The old customs house still stands on Kilspindie Point, though it was later converted into a warehouse and then a fisherman’s house.

Kilspindie Castle passed through numerous hands before being demolished to its current ruinous state at the start of the 18th Century. Scotland was on its way to becoming a thriving hub of trade and activity as it united itself with England and Wales to form the United Kingdom in 1707. There was no need for a military building in Aberlady any more.

The town became home to numerous weavers, who managed to survive the beginning years of the industrial revolution. But over time the local geography changed; the Forth silted up, so ships could no longer stop at Aberlady, and Leith became the preferred port. In the mid-19th Century, the rights of anchorage were sold to the Earls of Weymss for £375. This, along with the arrival of the railways, meant that Aberlady was no longer important and it went into serious decline.

One of the Earls had several boats from the Cockenzie fishing fleet deliberately beached here so that, apparently, it would improve his view of the area. A few other ships have joined them since, and they are now maritime scheduled ancient monuments, protected from being removed.

Things changed once more in 1898. As more people had disposable income, they wanted places to visit for their holidays. Gullane and Aberlady station was opened that year, and many people flocked to visit the sea and – more importantly – to play golf. Gullane golf course in particular has recently hosted the Scottish Open and The Open Championship – the oldest golf championship in the world.

One of the other notable buildings in Aberlady is the Parish Church. Built around the 1400s, it continued in its function as the protestant reformation took hold. The Earls of Weymss were buried here, and in the 18th Century it was rebuilt. Francis, the 9th Earl, took a particular hand in forming the church to his liking. After the death of his wife Louisa Bingham in 1887, he had the floor lowered and a full sized marble effigy of her laid inside. A reconstruction of the Saxon cross discovered in the manse garden can now be found in the church grounds. Thanks to the similarities to the Abercorn crosses, experts were able to figure out what the original cross would have looked like, and master stonemason Barry Grove carved it. He has also done reconstructions of ancient Pictish stones. 

By this point the Earls were living in Gosford House, a few miles along the coast, and during 1940 it housed British troops as they trained for combat during World War II. Later, it housed Prisoners of War.

Another sign of the war came in the form of large concrete blocks laid along the shoreline to prevent a beach landing, should the Axis invade Britain. Some of these are still visible today.

Out at sea, next to all those older shipwrecks placed by the Earl of Weymss, there are also two wrecks dating to the war period. Not enemy vessels, however, but training submarines dating to 1943-4. Hopefully the sailors did not repeat their mistakes and beach any more craft.

So what shall we say to Rev. John Smith, the parish minister in 1845? Has there really been nobody of note to come from this village? Well, perhaps we cannot point to a specific person born in Aberlady who went on to shape the world. But certainly it is not a place where nothing has ever happened. For a time the trade of Scotland passed through it, and it is still a place to which people are drawn. For myself, I look forward to the lifting of lockdown restrictions in Scotland so that I, too, can see all the places I’ve mentioned today.

And just like this minister, I underestimated how interesting Aberlady would be, so I’ll be bringing you Aberlemno next time.

69-70 [Abergynolwyn, Aberkenfig]

Episode 69 – Abergynolwyn

It’s been a while since my last blog post. Unfortunately non-Covid health reasons have been hammering me hard over the last few months, and although they’re getting better it’s still not perfect. Well, it’s now 2021 and I’m gonna try, again, to get this blog going. Apart from one week in September, I have been in Edinburgh all year. It’s been a little lonely, but on the other hand I have been able to spend time getting to know my online friends better.

And even if we are stuck inside, we can still travel across the world virtually. (Does that sound corny? Yes it does) So here I am, writing more about small Welsh villages. In the future I’ll be sticking to smaller settlements. Anywhere with more than 10,000 inhabitants is out. It’s a rather arbitrary limit, but it means I can focus on places with less well-documented history.

And in keeping with that theme, this time we’re heading to the middle of the Welsh west coast, eight miles north-east of Aberdyfi, where Nant Gwernol (Stream Gwernol) meets its end at Afon Dysynni.

It is a small village of around 350 inhabitants, founded in the mid 19th Century to house workers on the slate quarries. Besides coal, slate was one of Wales’ biggest employers. Even today Welsh slate is highly praised for its quality. Today it is in the county of Gwynedd, but back then it was in Merionethshire – one of Wales’ thirteen historic counties. It is very strongly Welsh-speaking, so it is no surprise that the village website is in both Welsh and English.

To the north of Abergynolwyn is the hamlet of Llanfihangel-y-Pennant. Since this hamlet is too small to appear in my map’s list of settlements, and as it has some interesting history of its own, let’s go there first.

The hamlet’s history goes all the way back to Llewellyn Fawr, who established a castle nearby in the early 13th Century. It did not last long, falling to the English after Llewellyn ap Gruffydd’s defeat in 1283. You can still visit the castle today, and see the ancient stone ruins.

More recently, in 1800, the hamlet was home to a poor Welsh girl called Mary Jones. From the age of eight, she had expressed a solid belief in Christianity, following the same Calvinist Methodist tradition as her parents. And like so many Welsh Christians, she wanted to read the Bible in her own language of Welsh. So from that age she began saving, and when she was fifteen she had finally got enough to pay for one.

There was one barrier in the way, however: the nearest Welsh Bibles for sale were in the town of Bala, a 25 mile walk away. And even if she could get to Bala, there was no guarantee they’d have the Bible. It wasn’t like she could phone ahead or check online. 25 miles was a day’s journey for anyone.

But Mary was undeterred, and set out for Bala. Since her family was so poor she wore no shoes but went barefoot the whole way. Eventually after a long walk she arrived in Bala, and went to the house of Reverend Thomas Charles, the only seller of Welsh Bibles there. To her dismay he was sold out, and wouldn’t have any more for some time.

Depending on which version of the story you hear, the Reverend either gave her a Bible promised to another family, or she had to wait two days for another to arrive. Either way, she was able to get the Bibles she so desired for herself and her family. Afterwards she returned the 25 miles home.

Reverend Charles was so impressed by her determination that he persuaded the Religious Tract Society to set up a new organisation to deliver Bibles to Wales – the London and Foreign Bible Society – which still exists today delivering Bibles across the world.

To many Christians, Mary Jones is an exemplar of devotion and love of God, and her story is often told to young children in Christian families to encourage them in the faith as well. I remember learning about her when I was young too. The house where she lived as an adult is now a memorial, and one of her Bibles is preserved at Cambridge University.

Today we might be inclined to think that walking so far just for a Bible is a bit crazy and unrelatable, but instead think of it in the same light as someone saving several years wages to travel around the world to see their favourite football team. If you care about something so much, you would do anything for it.

Abergynolwyn’s history starts with Bryneglwys Quarry, founded in the 1840s by John Pughe of Aberdyfi. But the quarry’s location made transportation difficult and his business was ultimately unsuccessful. A few years later, the Aberdovey Slate Company came to the area, establishing the village and – importantly – the railway. The Talyllyn Railway terminates at Nant Gwernol to the south, and also has an Abergynolwyn station to the west. It follows the Dysynni valley all the way to the coast at Tywyn. From 1867 the company was renamed the Abergynolwyn Slate Company.

In 1911 the company was bought by Henry Haydn Jones MP. Born in 1863, Henry Jones had been brought up by his uncle in Tywyn after the early death of his father. He became involved in local politics, and was elected as one of the first members of Merionethshire County Council. Later in 1910, standing for the Welsh Liberal Party, he was elected MP for Merioneth.

He seems to have been a very popular MP with his constituents, turning the upstairs of a Tywyn ironmonger’s into his office where people could come to him with issues they were facing. However he was not so popular with Lloyd George, the party’s leader and later the Prime Minister.

It was around this time that he became aware of the pending sale of Abergynolwyn – the village, the land all the way down to Tywyn, and the slate company. In all likelihood this would mean the company permanently closing, leading to a massive loss of jobs in the area. So he bought the lot for £5250, ensuring the livelihoods of the valley’s residents. He later expanded his holdings to another nearby quarry.

This was not a money making scheme. By the 1920s there was little slate left to be had, and what was there could only be obtained by costly measures. Sometimes there was so little to be done that people could only work for three days a week! And with so little work available, nobody really wanted to work there. Yet the little quarry pushed on until in 1946 a roof fall finally put an end to it.

He was knighted in 1937, and remained MP until 1945, by which time he was 81, when he stood down having served through two world wars and the 1930s great depression. This is an especially impressive feat considering the large amount of industrial employment in the area; people employed in this sort of industry would be much more likely to vote Labour overall (he was generally more supportive of Labour than the Conservatives).

Sir Henry was heavily involved in the running of the Talyllyn railway, ensuring that it continued throughout World War II instead of being scrapped for iron. After his death in 1950, it was leased by English engineer LTC Rolt, the lease of which continues to this day allowing the railway to continue operation. One of the locomotives – ex-Corris Railway No. 3 – was named “Sir Haydn” in his honour.

He also shows up in another very unexpected place – Thomas the Tank Engine. The Rev W V Awdry, who wrote the Thomas the Tank Engine books, was one of those involved with the Talyllyn Railway preservation. He named locomotive No. 3 on the fictional Skarloey Railway “Sir Handel” – and Sir Haydn himself makes appearances under the name Sir Handel Brown.

Episode 70 – Aberkenfig

Aberkenfig is a small village on the outskirts of Bridgend, on the south coast of Wales. It is part of a collection of five villages – Aberkenfig, Tondu, Sarn, Brynmenyn and Bryncethin – that are all centred on Sarn station and form a single suburban area.

By its name you will not be surprised that Nant Cenfig – Kenfig stream – flows here into the River Ogmore. Ogmore comes from the Welsh ‘Eog-Mor’ meaning ‘Salmon Water’.

The village was formed relatively recently, as a mining town. In its early history it was part of the parishes of St Brides Minor and Newcastle. Eventually the Newcastle parish was no longer able to cope with the size of the congregation, and St. John’s church was built in the village. As a result, today there are two Church of Wales Churches in the village.

In 1873, Fr. Robert Isodor Green, a Benedictine Catholic priest, came to work at St. Mary’s Church in Bridgend. All the Catholic families of Aberkenfig had to walk into Bridgend every Sunday to attend mass, and the priest saw that this caused the families a lot of hardship, especially in the winter.

After teaching at St. Mary’s school in the mornings, Fr. Green spent his afternoons in Aberkenfig and Tondu, amongst the people. As he did so, he realised how much this area was in need of its own church and school. This was a costly endeavour. So how to raise the money?

Normally priests had a housekeeper (just like in ‘Father Ted’) to take care of their cleaning, cooking and laundry. But Fr. Green dispensed with that. From 1877 he saved money by doing all his housework himself, and reduced his meals considerably so that he only spent a shilling a day.

In 1879 St. Robert’s Church and school were founded, named after St. Robert of Newminster, a Catholic saint who happened to share the priest’s name. The site had a 70 year lease, and every day while the church was built, Fr. Green would come and watch its progress.

After its construction he remained in Aberkenfig until 1885 when he went to serve elsewhere. He retired in 1904 and died peacefully in 1912.

St. Robert’s church was initially underneath the parish of St. Mary’s, Bridgend, until in 1924 it became independent with its own parish priest, Fr. Benedict Inisan. He oversaw the construction of a new school building 1926, as the education system within the UK continued to develop so the children no longer studied in the church itself. He sadly passed away soon after, in 1928.

In 1958, on the anniversary of Fr. Green’s death, a pipe organ was installed in St. Robert’s and dedicated to the priest. Memorial plaques were installed for Fr. Green and Fr. Inisan.

Today Aberkenfig is no longer run by Benedictine priests, coming instead under the Archdioscese of Cardiff since 1949. As for the school, a large secondary school was built in 1964 and St. Roberts became for primary students only.

Although Aberkenfig is still a small place, it has a large number of churches of various denominations, as well as a mosque. It has lost its mining and industry connections, and now acts as a commuter town for Bridgend to the south.

Next time, we’re finally leaving Wales! We’re returning to Scotland to visit the villages of Aberlady in East Lothian, and Aberlemno in Angus.

Episodes 67 and 68

Welcome back. Hopefully my blog will become a more regular feature while we’re all inside. I’m not planning to make a regular schedule, instead releasing episodes once they’re ready. I moved my desk into my front room so I can get lots of light, and even open the balcony door when it’s warm. It’s a lovely sunny day, but I’ve already been out for my daily exercise so here I am inside, writing away.

Today we’re visiting two villages that are very different in age and history.

Episode 67 – Abergwynfi, Neath Port Talbot

Abergwynfi is not particularly notable. It is right next to Blaengwynfi, the village at the source of the river Gwynfi, so as you can imagine the river is rather short. The river Afan runs between the two communities. It lies a few miles north east of Port Talbot.

The two villages were built in the late 19th Century and marketed as “the Cape of Good Hope” of mining, where you could come and make a new life for yourself in the mines. Today the villages are still known as ‘The Cape’. The streets are laid out in a pattern very common to mining towns, with rows of identical cottages along straight roads. The mining companies built them for their workers’ families. As a result of this, mining towns developed close communities.

The mines near The Cape were the Afan Colliery, which opened in 1877 and closed in 1969, and the Glyncorrwg Pit, which opened in 1890. The Glyncorrwg pit, more commonly known as ‘The Scattern’ or ‘Perch’s Pit’, brought a number of families to work and live in the area.

Early in the life of Perch’s Pit, the mine suffered a disaster. In October 1891, the shaft was still being sunk – they hadn’t got to the coal yet. Men were carried in and out of the pit in a large iron bucket known as a bowk. On this particular day, eight men got in the bowk to be lifted back up to the surface, but as it was going up the top of the cables got tangled up and the bowk overturned. The poor miners fell down the shaft to their deaths. Two of the men who died were residents of Abergwynfi – William Evans, 51, who had five children, and William Thomas, 35, with two. With such a small community, everyone must have been hit hard, but especially these men’s wives and children.

Despite this accident, people still came to work at Perch’s Pit, and there were nearly 200 employed by 1896.

Episode 68 – Abergwyngregyn, Gwynedd

We’re now taking a leap much further back in time, to the bronze age, when the ancient Britons were in charge of these islands. Dating back well before the Roman invasion of Britain, the small village of Abergwyngregyn – or as it was known then Aber Garth Celyn – is positioned strategically along the north coast of Wales. Today the name is normally shortened to ‘Aber’.

The Snowdonia mountains to the south forced all travellers to pass through this point, and if they were trying to get to Anglesey, they would need to cross round here. So from ancient times this village became the guard point of the crossing. Indeed, there are defences along the side of the valley with views right across to the Isle of Man. The Romans built a road through the area, and the remains can still be seen in places.

After the Romans left Britain, new Welsh kingdoms rose up. Aber was part of Gwynedd, and formed an important part of their defences. Later, when defence became less important, their princes seem to have preferred life on the mainland. Llewellyn ap Iorweth was the first to abandon the palace at Aberffraw to make this village their royal home. His grandson, Llewelyn ap Gruffudd, was the last of his line to live here, with his wife Eleanor.

Eleanor was born into the ‘de Montfort’ family, a powerful Norman dynasty who were at the heart of major political events in 13th Century England. Her father, Simon de Montfort, is most notable for having turned Britain from having an absolute monarchy under King Henry III, to beginning the process of what would eventually become today’s constitutional monarchy. Her mother, Eleanor, was Henry’s youngest child.

Simon led the barons in a war, seizing power from the king and in 1264 effectively becoming ruler of England. At this time he made an alliance with Llewellyn ap Gruffydd, and to help seal the deal he promised his daughter to Llewellyn as his wife. During his time as ruler, Simon took away the right of absolute power from the monarchy and held a parliament to which lower members of the nobility were invited. Not peasants, for sure, but it was a change nonetheless.

But Henry did not just sit back and allow de Montfort to take power. The war continued and in 1265 the royal and baronial armies came up against each other at Evesham. In the battle, Eleanor’s father and brother were both killed, and the king resumed his rule. He had the de Montfort family banished forever from England. Eleanor and her mother were forced to flee to France for safety. There they lived for 10 years, during which time Henry died and his son Edward became king of England. Then in 1275 her mother also died.

Alone now, Eleanor needed a new guardian. The marriage agreement had not been forgotten, and so she and Llewellyn took action on that promise. Though not yet together, they were married through proxies – other people said the vows on their behalf. Legally they were now husband and wife.

Boarding a ship in France, Eleanor headed towards Wales and her husband. The most direct route would have been through England, but the banishment still stood. She was also now married to Edward’s enemy, as he sought to expand English territory into Wales. Her ship had to go all the way around the Cornish peninsula before going up the Welsh coast. The king had got wind of the plan and commanded her capture. Several Bristolian ships set out to intercept, captured her, and had her brought back to England. They were given a hefty reward of £20 for their efforts. Eleanor was taken to Windsor and kept prisoner for three years. While she was a prisoner, she was also a noblewoman so she would have been reasonably comfortable during this time.

Eventually Edward made peace with Llewellyn, and Eleanor was freed. In 1278 she was finally able to meet her husband, and on the doorstep of Worcester Cathedral they finally confirmed their marriage vows. It was the king himself who gave her away.

Eleanor returned to Abergwygregyn with her husband, and it was here in June 1282 that she gave birth to a daughter, Gwenllian. But births in those days were a risky business, regardless of station. Eleanor tragically lost her life in childbirth, and her body was carried across to Anglesey for burial at Llanfaes.

The year continued to go poorly for Llewellyn. Fighting hard against the Norman invasion of Wales, he was captured and killed in December 1282. His brother Dafydd, attempted to lead the defence but was captured at Bera Mountain, just to the south of the village. Within a year of Llewellyn’s death, all of Wales was under Norman control.

As for Gwenllian, aged just one she found herself banished to a remote priory in Lincolnshire. Here the last native princess of Wales remained until her death in 1337.

The new rulers of Wales, the Normans, also saw Aber as a key location and built a castle here. The motte is still visible to this day, and archaeologists have found the remains of a good-sized hall on the site.

Aber no longer has the fate of crowns in its hands, but it remains an interesting place in its own way. It is a popular place for visitors to come and enjoy nature. From the village you can see across the Menai Straits to Anglesey, and a walk along the river into the foothills of Snowdonia takes you up to the Aber Falls. There is also a Welsh whisky distillery here.

Abergwyngregyn is also home to both a massive hydroelectric dam on the Afon Anafon, and a smaller water power generator in the building of an old water mill for making flour. The mill today houses the village’s community centre with a cafe and meeting rooms. It’s all part of their aim to become the greenest village in Wales, as they have used profits from the larger dam to make their homes more energy efficient and insulated.

Next time we remain in Gwynedd, but we’re travelling a long south west to the west coast of Wales, and the village of Abergynolwyn.

Episodes 64-66

Welcome back to the blog. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Making this a regular weekly blog became a bit frustrating for a while, so I took a long break. But with the free time Covid-19 has offered up to all of us, it’s time to get back into things. Most of the below post was written back in 2018, but from the next post everything will be brand new material.

I have decided that to make this more interesting and increase my motivation, I will be restricting my attention to places with less than 10,000 population. So without further ado, let’s get started.

As a quick reminder, in Welsh ‘aber’ means ‘river mouth’, and ‘afon’ means ‘river’. I’ve tried to use whatever name seems to be preferred locally, so ‘afon’ and ‘river’ might get used in the same sentence for different rivers.

Location 64 – Abergorlech, Carmarthenshire

All three villages we’re visiting today are tiny little places in Wales. We start off in Carmarthenshire, where the village of Abergorlech straddles the River Cothi. And, of course, it’s where the River Gorlech arrives at the Cothi. The most notable feature of the village is the grade II listed Pont Cothi – the bridge over the river. It is one of the oldest surviving bridges in Carmarthenshire, dating back to at least 1675 when it was made of wood. The current stone bridge has an inscription on it, “this bridge was mended by John Jones 1794”.

Abergorlech is home to two churches, which is quite common in even the smaller Welsh villages. As well as the established Anglican church, a sizable Methodist congregation has been active since early in the movement’s existence, in 1743. Unusually they were permitted to use the existing church building, St. David’s, to worship. Many Methodists had been forced to meet in their own homes.

The other notable building in the village is the Black Lion, the local pub and restaurant. After a long day participating in mountain biking or hiking along the Gorlech, it’s a great place to rest your tired legs.

Location 65 – Abergwesyn, Powys

Moving thirty miles north east we have the village of Abergwesyn. Here the Gwesyn arrives at the Afon Irfon. The village is formed of two settlements – Llanfihangel Abergwesyn and Llanddewi Abergwesyn, on opposite sides of the river. Though today they are united io a single settlement, they were once separate places each with their own church. Llanfihangel – St. Michael’s; Llanddewi – St. David’s.

Many thousands of years ago, this area of Wales would have been thriving with human activity. A walk across Abergwesyn Commons – a deserted expanse north of the village – reveals numerous Bronze Age cairns, particularly on the peak of Drygarn Fawr. This mountain is one of the highest peaks in mid Wales, and features two cairns that stick out from the barren landscape. It’s also the source of the Gwesyn.

A number of Medieval villages were scattered across The Commons, but things changed in the 1340s with the advent of the Black Death. Some of these villages lost more than half their population, and the survivors moved on to other places. They were never reinhabited. Abergwesyn may have survived only because of its relatively large size.

Having two parish churches is an unusual situation, caused by the village’s location at the border of two old church parishes. Though both fell under the jurisdiction of the Cistercian Strata Florida Abbey to the north west, each one had established a chapelry at Abergwesyn. A chapelry was a subdivision of a larger parish, often with its centre fairly remote, and allowed the residents of the area to worship and have secular issues taken care of where they lived rather than needing to travel. After the dissolution of the monasteries, both chapelries became parish churches.

Llanddewi, chapelry of Llangammarch Wells to the south east, is said to have been founded by St. David himself shortly after he became Bishop of Wales in 519. This half of the village was gradually abandoned over the years, and by the time the church closed in the mid-19th Century only a couple of cottages remained.

Legend has it that the Llanfihangel church was originally to be founded in the Cammarch Valley, at Llanwrtyd Wells. According to local author and poet Ruth Bidgood, “…St. Michael disapproved of this site, and hard though the builders might work by day, their labours were undone each night, when St. Michael would, by superhuman means move all the stones up to the side opposite Llanddewi. Eventually it was recognized that resistance was futile, and the second little church was built where the saint wished.” (Parishes of the Buzzard).

St. Michael’s and St. David’s were too small to run as properly separate churches, and for much of the time they – along with nearby Llanwrtyd – were looked after by a single Anglican curate. It is no surprise that in 1864 the two were finally united and a new single church built for the parish. This stood for around 100 years, before being demolished in the 1960s. Abergwesyn also had a chapel for the Welsh Methodists.

One of the churches’ most notable curates was William Williams. William’s father has been a non-conformist, but William underwent a religious conversion in 1737 and became an Anglican. He joined the newborn Methodist movement, which at the time was part of the Church of England. Though William wanted desperately to become a priest, the church leadership forbade this to Methodists.

So for a time, William was Abergwesyn’s parish curate. Perhaps he hoped that the church would eventually let Methodists become priests, but he soon realized this was not to be. He abandoned that path to become an itinerant Methodist preacher, leaving Abergwesyn to travel around Wales. He even visited Abergorlech. Everywhere he went, William converted more people to Methodism, and congregations were founded in his wake.

But William Williams, more commonly known as ‘Pantycelyn’ after the farmhouse he grew up in, is most famous for his hymns. He wrote nearly a thousand of them. Illiteracy was high amongst the common people, but by teaching them hymns they would learn and remember what Christian beliefs were. Pantycelyn had a knack for good hymns both in Welsh and English. His most famous hymn, ‘Guide me O thou great Jehovah’/‘Bread of Heaven’, still resonates around the Millennium Stadium whenever Wales are playing rugby.

Abergwesyn doesn’t have any churches today, and very few houses remain. Abergwesyn Commons are owned by the National Trust, and are a great place to go for a walk and look for rare wildlife and old human settlements.

Location 66 – Abergwili, Carmarthenshire

We now return to Carmarthenshire. Abergwili is quite close to the county town, Carmarthen, and hosts the Carmarthenshire County Museum. And as we’ve come to expect, it’s where the River Gwili meets another river – in this case the River Towy (or Tywi).

In 1291 Bishop Thomas Bek of St. David’s founded a college right here. Thomas’s brother was Bishop Antony Bek of Durham, a key figure in Edward I’s court who assisted in the appointment of John Balliol as King of the Scots for a short and disastrous reign. The college, dedicated to Saints Maurice and Thomas, operated for 250 years on the site, training men for the priesthood.

After the English reformation the college continued under the Church of England, even though the nature of the priesthood had changed. In 1541 they moved out of Abergwili to Brecon, and the Bishop of St. David’s moved in. Abergwili became host to one of the highest spiritual figures in Wales, second only to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

This move took place as part of plans to move the cathedral at St. David’s to Carmarthen. St. David’s is a remote town in the far south western tip of Wales, whereas Carmarthen (although still by the south coast) is much more central and accessible. Though the planned cathedral move never came to light, the bishop did move. The old bishop’s palace in St. David’s was abandoned and fell into ruin.

The bishop responsible for the move was Englishman William Barlow. Originally an Augustinian prior, he later switched from a monastic to a clerical career track to become a priest. During the reformation, he embraced the new protestant theology. After the ardently Catholic Queen Mary I’s coronation he fled to protestant Europe rather than teach Catholicism. He returned after her death, and was appointed Bishop of Chichester under Elizabeth I. Like many Evangelical clerics during the reformation, he married and had a large family – in his case two sons and five daughters – and would eventually die in 1568.

William’s successor as Bishop of St. David’s was Robert Ferrar, appointed in 1549. Another Evangelical, he really annoyed the monks at the Cathedral with his attempts at reformation, and they accused him of 56 different crimes related to religious behaviour. So in 1551 he was imprisoned in the Tower of London, but no action was taken against him until Mary’s coronation.

He was brought to trial in 1554, with proceedings mainly focussed around his marriage and children – something priests were expressly forbidden under Catholicism. He was stripped of his position, and in 1555 he was brought to Carmarthen and burned at the stake just outside the castle, defending his beliefs to the last. He is supposed to have shown no emotion or pain during his burning, in order that it might be a demonstration of his steadfastness.

His successor, Henry Morgan, was a Catholic. Queen Elizabeth (a firm protestant) relieved him of his position in 1559, and he died – possibly of a severe sickness – shortly thereafter.

From 1560 until 1920 the bishops of St. David’s served under the Church of England, with three periods of vacancy. In 1590 bishop Marmaduke Middleton was stripped of his role. Marmaduke had exhibited some dodgy behaviour in his previous position in Ireland, apparently stealing from the cathedral in Waterford, but the locals feared to bring charges against him in Dublin due to Irish anti-Protestant sentiment. When he came to St. David’s in 1582, he continued behaving badly, misusing his bishop’s privileges for monetary gain (a crime known as ‘simony’) and was also accused of bigamy. The crime that finally brought him down was forging a will, for which he was stripped of office. He was “the worst of contemporary bishops and one of the few Anglican diocesans ever to be dismissed from his see for his misdeeds.” Not until 1595 did St. David’s regain a bishop.

The next period of vacancy was during the English Commonwealth and Protectorate (1646-1660), when all bishops and archbishops were abolished. The republican government eliminated the existing hierarchies found in the nobility, monarchy and church, and would rule without it. It must have been quite a shock to the people.

After the restoration, the bishops were reinstated all across England and Wales. William Lucy, a royalist, was appointed as the new Bishop of St. David’s. The Cathedral and Bishop’s Palace were in bad shape after fourteen years of neglect, and William ended up spending a large sum of money on restorations.

The third vacancy of the position came in 1699, when the previous incumbent was found guilty of simony, and it remained empty until 1705 with the appointment of George Bull. George, a noted theologian in Latin and English, was even respected by the Catholic church. Sadly he was old and infirm by the time of this appointment, and died just a few years later aged 75.

In 1920, the Church in Wales became its own entity, splitting from the Church of England. Wales has six Anglican dioceses, each led by a bishop. Unlike in England, where the Archbishop of Canterbury is always the church’s leader, the Archbishop of Wales is appointed from amongst the six bishops. The current Archbishop is the Bishop of Swansea and Brecon, John Davies, appointed in 2017.

In 1971 the Bishop of St. David’s moved home – not very far, to a new house built on the grounds of the Palace – ‘Llys Esgob’ – and its current resident is Bishop Joanna Penberthy. The Church in Wales first permitted female bishops in 2013, and Joanna is the first woman to attain this post. The old house and grounds have been converted into the county museum, telling 60,000 years of Carmarthenshire history.

Next time we’re visiting two more small Welsh villages – a young mining village in the south, and an ancient royal home in the north.

References

Abergorlech

https://www.walesdirectory.co.uk/Towns_in_Wales/Abergorlech_Town.htm

http://www.coflein.gov.uk/en/site/23996/details/pont-cothi

http://www.cynwylgaeobenefice.org.uk/abergorlech/

https://blion.co.uk/

Abergwesyn

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/abergwesyn-common/features/discover-ancient-abergwesyn

https://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/hewitts/drygarn-fawr

http://www.irfonvalleyparish.co.uk/st-davids-tirabad.html

http://www.cpat.org.uk/ycom/breck/abergwesyn.pdf

Parishes of the Buzzard, Ruth Bidgood, 2000

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/waleshistory/2012/03/william_williams_pantycelyn_bread_of_heaven_composer.html

Abergwili

http://historypoints.org/index.php?page=former-bishop-s-palace-abergwili

https://tywigateway.org.uk/our-story/the-bishops-park-history/

http://yba.llgc.org.uk/en/s-BARL-WIL-1499.html

https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/bishop-who-burned-stake-centre-14695349

http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-18678;jsessionid=264E6F67A88457049FE3FC170C549340

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1sLeCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT99&lpg=PT99&dq=bishop+william+lucy&source=bl&ots=hvkNnz7eNs&sig=Z2rweBjeAciOHOMd-I29g9k4u-w&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjLg-z1vJXdAhVGglwKHS0ZBa8Q6AEwDnoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=bishop%20william%20lucy&f=false

 

Episode 63 – Abergele, Conwy

Welcome back to the blog! It’s been a really long time since the last episode, for which I apologise. For a while I have been quite tired and demotivated, and just when I got back into the blogging mood I went on holiday to New Zealand for my brother’s wedding. But now I have returned. I can’t promise to be regular with these posts right now as I’m really busy at work, and sometimes when I get home I just want to chill. We’ll see how it goes.

Recently I’ve been reading a book called ‘The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England’. Imagine you could travel back to the 14^th Century. Where would you stay? What would you eat? How do you avoid offending people? It’s a fascinating look at what everyday life was like in the 14^th Century, and it’s also available as an audiobook so you have no excuse to miss out!

Last time I said we’d be visiting Abergavenny, but I’ve had a change of heart. Abergavenny is a large town and its history is easy to discover. Instead, I want to bring you something you don’t know about, and I think I might do just that this week as we visit the coast of North Wales, and the small town of Abergele.

Two weeks ago I knew nothing about this town, but thanks to the magic of the internet I now know that Castle Gwyrch was built by the Illuminati as a landing pad for alien spaceships.

In all seriousness, though, Abergele is a fascinating place. People have lived here for over 3,000 years, and for a long time it was a border town between England and Wales. More recently it has had an explosive encounter with the Welsh independence movement.

Abergele (pronounced ‘gelly’ with a hard ‘g’) is right next door to the seaside town of Pensarn. Once just a couple of cottages, as the Victorians embraced seaside holidays it expanded rapidly to fill the gap between Abergele and the coast. The conservative landholders in Abergele itself had been concerned about the changes this would bring to their town, which is why Pensarn grew instead. Today they share a train station, and if you saw the two towns from the air they would appear to be the same settlement.

The River Gele flows west to east, just to the south of the town. It’s termination in the River Clwyd is a few miles away to the east.

Settlement began 3,000-2,500 years ago at Castell Cawr, ‘Giant’s Castle’, bordering the south west of Abergele. This hill fort was built on an existing hill with natural cliffs to the east and south, and the rest of the hill was shaped into slopes and ditches. Timber would have been used to create a defensive wall around the top, which was flattened. The tribe that inhabited this fort were most likely the Deceangli, who inhabited the north east of modern Wales right up to where the town of Chester is today. The minimal archaeological surveys carried out on this site suggest a number of round huts were constructed on the hill top.

The Romans arrived in the 2^nd Century CE and turned Abergele into a trading town, since it was both by the coast and protected from winter storms by the hills. The soldiers did not stay separate from the locals, and many men from Abergele carry Y-chromosome types more commonly found in the Balkans than Northern Europe. This same pattern is found at other locations where the Roman Army had a strong presence.

Once the Romans left, not much seems to have happened in Abergele. But in the 8^th Century it would become a focal point of battle between the Welsh and the Saxons. It is not so far away from Offa’s Dyke, the great border wall built between Mercia and Wales. It would be crossed often as the Welsh and Saxons made war against each other. The terrain around Abergele forms a natural narrowing that made an ideal defensive point known as Cevn Ogo, turning it into one of the bloodiest battlegrounds in Conwy.

1062, just prior to the Norman Conquest, saw Earl Harold Godwinson do battle here against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn. Harold was taking revenge for an attack by Gruffydd 7 years earlier, when the town of Hereford had been destroyed. Gruffydd had an English ally, Aelfgar Earl of Mercia, whom Harold hated, and it was only Aelfgar that had prevented Harold going to war before. The battle at Cevn Ogo was a terrible defeat for the English, who were pushed back to the nearby town of Rhuddlan.

After the death of King Edward of England in 1066, Harold became the new king. But it wasn’t to last. He faced challengers from Norway and Normandy, and though the Norwegians were defeated, the Normans conquered. England had a new king, William I, who brought with him a new culture and a new leadership.

Abergele once again became the centre of conflict as the Normans sought to expand England’s borders. They constructed a timber castle here in the early 12^th Century, which was replaced by a stone castle after Rhys ap Gruffydd conquered it in 1170. But eventually Wales would eventually fall under Norman control for good, though Abergele remained primarily Welsh-speaking. Gwrych Castle stood until the 17^th Century, when Oliver Cromwell destroyed it in the English Civil War – the Welsh had been primarily Royalist.

Gwrych Castle

In 1787 the heiress to Gwrych Castle, Frances Lloyd, married Robert Bamford-Hesketh of Bamford Hall, Derbyshire. They named their eldest son and heir Lloyd Hesketh, linking the two families together.

In 1810 Lloyd began the task of building a new castle, to appear as if it had stood there for hundreds of years. Unlike many such ‘follies’ built across Europe in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries, Lloyd’s castle would also serve a practical purpose as the family home.

After 15 years construction was completed. Towards the end of this time Lloyd married Lady Emily Esther Ann Lygon, the daughter of the 1^st Earl of Beauchamp. Lloyd and Emily’s son Robert would continue the castle’s development, building a grand 4,000 acre estate around it. He and his wife Ellen Jones-Bateman also supported Abergele through provision of schools and churches.

Robert and Ellen’s only surviving child was Winifred. Born in 1859, by 19 years old she’d been married off to Douglas Cochrane, heir to the Earldom of Dundonald in Scotland. Their marriage was unhappy, and though they had five children they spent much time apart. She did not travel with him when he went to his estates in Scotland, or on military duty as a commander in Africa – he led a great victory at Ladysmith during the Boer War. Instead she remained at her parents’ home in Abergele.

After Robert died in 1894, she inherited Gwrych Castle. Women had only been able to own their own property for around twenty years, but even so she would have been expected to have her husband manage the estate for her. Winifred, however, was not of that character. She ably managed not only Abergele but also other land across England and Wales she’d received from her parents.

In the 1900s she continued to show her independence by banning Douglas from the castle altogether. During this time she became a heartfelt Anglican and close friend of Dr. Alfred Edwards, Bishop of St. Asaph Cathedral. Unlike her friend, however, she supported the disestablishment of the Welsh church from the Church of England. This would happen in 1920, and Alfred would become the first Archbishop of Wales.

A proud Welshwoman, Winifred fully embraced her heritage. As a notable supporter of Welsh art and literature, she was made a bard at the Eisteddfod of 1910 and took the bardic name ‘Rhiannon’. That same year she held an exhibition of Welsh culture in nearby Colwyn Bay.

Despite her support of disestablishing the church and her feminist views, Winifred was also one of the early female members of the Primrose League. This League saw its duty as promoting the values of the Conservative Party across Britain. No doubt many of the party’s members viewed her independent mindedness with some concern. This member suggests to me that outside a few particular areas of liberal thinking, she was quite traditional in her lifestyle.

Certainly Winifred saw herself as holding the traditional duty of noblesse oblige, that privilege entails social responsibility to those less fortunate. Through her life she continued the work her parents had begun in providing education and services to the residents of Abergele. And on her death there in 1924, she bequeathed £5,000 towards the construction of houses for ‘aged and impoverished persons of good character’ in the parish. Sadly these instructions were not acted upon promptly, and just after they were eventually taken up World War Two put a pause on the plans. The project was finally begun in the late 1950s, and by November 1961 construction was completed on the Winifred Bamford-Hesketh Almshouses, opened by the 14^th Countess of Dundonald – her grandson’s wife.

Another of her bequests was Gwrych Castle. She offered it to the King, who refused it, and it was given to the Venerable Order of St. John. Then in 1928 her husband Douglas bought it back again, though it seems to have been abandoned.

During World War Two it was home to Jewish refugees, and after the war was sold by the Dundonalds. For a time it was used for medieval re-enactments, and the boxer Randolph Turpin trained here. But it soon faded away and fell to ruin. Was there any hope left for this Victorian folly?

Thanks to one precocious eleven-year-old boy in 1996, there was. Mark Baker decided then to found the Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust, and even as he grew up he made it his mission to keep the castle going any way he could. After two attempts to have the castle made into a luxury hotel, earlier this year (2018) the castle came up for auction and the Trust finally owned it. As of June, it is open to the public and in the process of being restored.

Tragedy by rail and sea

August 26^th 1848. 170 years ago. Liverpool, England. 8am.

Heading out to sea on the high tide, the Ocean Monarch carries aboard her several hundred passengers, bound for the United States of America. Some regularly make this journey. Others are emigrating from the UK to start a new life. This steam-powered wooden barque is barely a year old, and will take nearly two weeks to cross the Atlantic.

By noon she is 26 miles into her journey, following the north coast of Wales. All seems well. But as a passing yacht, the Queen of the Ocean, watches, all turns to disaster.

Fire spews up from the engine, rapidly consuming everything in its path. The passengers panic and flee to the distant parts of the vessel. Some throw themselves and their children into the water, trying to escape. Many drown.

The yacht immediately moves to help the Ocean Monarch, sending a boat to pick up survivors. For a long time she is the only one nearby.

Then more help comes. At one thirty the Affonso, a Brazilian navy vessel under test with several royal dignitaries aboard, is passing by. She turns to assist and is able to tie a line to the burning Monarch. Those dignitaries, including the Prince de Joinville – heir to the non-existent French throne – roll up their sleeves and help as many people as they can. They are later joined by a couple of steamers.

It is hard for us to imagine what it must have been like. There were no radios to call for help, no lifeboats ready to move into action from the shore. Though there were lifeboats aboard the Ocean Monarch, the panic and chaos made it impossible for more than a few to be launched.

Of the nearly 400 people who had set out from Liverpool that day hoping to see America in just a couple of weeks, only 219 survived. 180 would never achieve their dream of starting life again in the New World. And for the survivors, all the possessions they brought with them to start that life were gone.

The disaster gained international attention, and there was an outpouring of public grief and support for the Ocean Monarch. In a time when Europe was in turmoil due to revolution and disaffection – one of the reasons the French throne no longer existed – and when even the UK was impacted by the resulting economic distress, there was still a generous outpouring of financial donations from across societal classes for the survivors.

 

Just as travel at sea was being revolutionised, with steam power cutting Atlantic crossing times considerably, so travel by land was changing. Railways were built all over Britain, allowing people to travel from one end of the country to another in a single day. The dependence on the horse was over, at least for long-distance journeys.

One of the railways that was constructed passed along the north coast of Wales, a branch of the London and North Western Railway. Ireland was still part of the UK back then, and every day a train would travel from London to Holyhead in Anglesey filled with mail for the island country.

The Irish Mail was a few minutes late on 20 August 1868 as it left Euston Station, filled with packages and passengers. Four hours later, at 11.30am, it arrived in Chester where it linked up with more carriages.

They weren’t the only train on the line. A slower goods train was ahead of them, which would need to move out of the way to let them pass.

The station after Abergele was Llanddulas, and it had some sidings where the goods train could get out of the way. Unfortunately these sidings already had some empty carriages in them from a previous train, and the goods train wouldn’t quite fit – six carriages plus the guards van stuck out on the main line. The station manager decided they could move some of the empty carriages into another siding to allow room for the full goods train.

But as they were moving things around, those last few carriages of the goods train broke loose. There was a gradient on the rail line all the way back from Llanddulas to Abergele, and they quickly picked up speed.

By this time the Irish Mail had completed its stop in Abergele. They were around two miles out of the town when the driver saw the speeding carriages heading towards them. His first assumption was that they were on the opposite track, but to his horror he soon realised they were due to collide.

He applied the brakes to slow the train down, reducing the momentum from the collision, and at the last minute flung himself from the cabin. His fireman – stoking the engine with coal – was not so lucky.

With a mighty explosion, the goods wagons slammed into the Irish Mail. The front of that train derailed and took the first few carriages with it along the tracks. Paraffin from the goods wagons ignited and swept through this part of the train. The people inside tried to escape, but the common practice of locking carriage doors from the outside prevented them. They, the fireman and the guard all perished. 33 lives in total.

Never before had so many lives been lost in a railway accident in Britain. Thankfully a train coming in the opposite direction was stopped before it could collide with debris on the eastbound line, otherwise it would have been even worse.

As a result of the disaster, new safety precautions were put in place – steep inclines had catchpoints added to stop loose wagons, and carriage doors were no longer locked from the inside. It was not until 1879 that new regulations were introduced for safe transporting of flammable materials.

Those who died were buried in a communal grave at St. Michael’s parish church, Abergele. The driver survived, but injuries he received exacerbated an existing condition, and he died in October the same year.

National Pride

It’s hard to find a Welshman who isn’t proud of the country they live in, and a significant minority would like it to become independent of the United Kingdom. Unlike nationalist movements in other parts of the world, such as Ireland, they are not associated with using violence to achieve their goals.

But for a few very determined Welshmen in the 1960s, they would stop at almost nothing to achieve independence. Mudiad Amddiffyn Cymru (MAC) – the Welsh Defence Movement – was a paramilitary Welsh nationalist organisation, set up in 1963 in response to the flooding of a Welsh valley to provide water for Liverpool. Feeling oppressed by the British government, they began a bombing campaign to strike fear into the authorities.

Their bombing mastermind was John Jenkins, a sergeant in the British Army’s dental corps. By day he pulled teeth, by night he built bombs and delivered them across Wales where the MAC ground troops would set them up. They targetted infrastructure and government buildings, causing much disruption but not killing or injuring anyone.

But the MAC never really found a way to make a big statement until July 1969. Prince Charles had come of age, and was due to be invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle. He would be travelling there by train, right through Abergele. The MAC had people there who would be willing to plant a bomb.

So John Jenkins delivered the bomb, and the night before the big event the two bombers went to plant it at government buildings there. It would be a statement of intent – we could get you if we wanted to. But something went wrong. During the process, the bomb went off, killing the pair.

The daughter of one of the men claims her father would never have been involved with such an activity, and was actually trying to stop the bombing. John Jenkins himself says both were MAC members.

There were several other bombs set to go off the next day. Two failed entirely. One injured a boy who kicked it, thinking it was a football. Only one succeeded. The two bombers were the only two people killed in the entire campaign.

In November 1969 John Jenkins was arrested, and in 1970 imprisoned for 10 years for his activity, though released early in 1976.

There’s much more I could say about Abergele. I could tell you about the growth of neighbouring Pensarn as the local families tried to protect Abergele from the modernising liberal influence of the Victorian holidaymakers. I could even tell you about the minor British celebrities who come from there.

But really there’s only one person from Abergele who I want to talk about. Even though his family emmigrated to the United States when he was very young, he is still connected to his British and Welsh roots. In fact, he’s making a whole podcast about British History, taking the opportunity to explore the subject in much more depth than you’ll ever get from a history book. So please, check out Jamie Jeffers’ British History Podcast. It’s my favourite thing to come out of Abergele, and I hope it will soon be yours too.

Next time we’ll be visiting a few tiny Welsh villages scattered around the country, and seeing what historical nuggets we can find there. See you then!

References

Castell Cawr, Coflein

Dinorben, Destroyed Hillfort, Coflein

Castell Cawr close up information board (picture), The Megalithic Portal

Abergele and Pensarn, Visit Llandudno

Abergele (Aber-Galau), Samuel Lewis, ‘Abergele – Ambleston’, in A Topographical Dictionary of Wales (London, 1849), pp. 12-25. British History Online

History and Guide of Abergele (pdf), Abergele Town Council

Gwrych Castle, Castle Wales

Visit – Gwrych Castle, Gwrych Castle Preservation Trust

Winifred Bamford Hesketh Almshouses

Emigrant Ship Ocean Monarch Burnt at Sea, various sources

The Tragedy of the ‘Ocean Monarch’, Adam Matthew

The Abergele railway disaster, Phil Carradice, BBC Wales, September 2013

“I CURSE THE DAY I WAS BORN A WELSHMAN”, James Montague, Delayed Gratification Magazing, 1 July 2012. The Slow Journalism Company

Dad wasn’t a a bomb maker says North Wales woman, North Wales Daily Post, 19 April 2013

Episode 62 – Aberfoyle, Perth and Kinross

Once again I find myself having to apologise for the delay to this episode. My excuse this time is that I had my 30^th birthday, and my parents came to visit me in Edinburgh. We had a great time, visiting Edinburgh Castle, Aberdour Castle and Falkland Palace. Falkland Palace is very similar to Aberdour, just on a grander, more regal scale. I can highly recommend a visit.

Today we return to Scotland and the village of Aberfoyle, a remote place to the west of Stirling but popular with tourists thanks to the Trossachs National Park to the north west. This is a beautiful, forested area, whose popularity grew in part thanks to one author with a connection to this village. Here also the River Forth comes into being, as the Duchray Water and Avondhu River come together into a single entity. From here it grows and grows as it meanders south east, eventually emerging into the great Firth of Forth by Edinburgh.

Ancient capital

Aberfoyle’s origins date back to 569 when Aedan, Prince of the Forth, was pronounced King of Manau Gododdin – the lands south of the Forth – and made his capital at Eperpuill, as it was then called.

Aedan’s great-grandfather Fergus Mor was the leader of the Scotti, an Irish tribe, who brought them across the Irish Sea into Pictland. Here he founded the kingdom of Dalriada, which includes the western coast of Scotland and some of north-east Ireland. Fergus died in 501 and his son Domangart became king after him. But his reign was not long, and he soon died in 507.

Comgall mac Domangart became king of Dalriada, and meanwhile Gabhran mac Domangart his brother decided to expand their borders. Gabhran married a British princess whose father ruled Manau Gododdin, and whose uncle was king of Strathclyde. Aedan was born from their union in 527. Some suggest he was even born at Aberfoyle.

In 538 Comgall abdicated to enter a monastery, a common thing for kings to do in those days, and was succeeded by his brother Gabhran, since the tradition of the eldest son inheriting was not then in place. Aedan married a Pictish royal princess in 545, extending Dalriada’s connections.

Gabhran died in battle against the Picts 20 years after taking the throne, and his nephew Conall succeeded him. Conall died in 574, and the choice of heir was between two of Gabhran’s sons – Eogan and Aedan. It could have led to war, but in stepped Saint Columba.

Columba is the most well-known of all the Irish saints. He came across to Scotland in 563 and founded the monastery at Iona. From there he travelled all over the country, converting people to Christianity. It’s said that the holy man’s word was always heeded, so when he gave his opinion on the choice of King of Dalriada, he was listened to. He had a dream in which he was told by God to ordain Aedan as king, so he had to abandon his first preference of Eogan. At this time Iona became the Royal Church of the Kingdom of the Scots.

Over his life, Aedan made Dalriada as strong as it had ever been, freeing it from Irish overlordship and sending out expeditions as far as Orkney. Eventually in 606 he abdicated in favour of his son, retiring to a monastery. One of his sons was Artur MacAedan, who is one of many potential inspirations for the legend of King Arthur.

Literary connections

It would be a thousand years before anything else of historical significance happened at Aberfoyle, but since the late 17^th Century it has proved an inspiration for several authors.

The appropriately-named Robert Kirk was born at Aberfoyle in 1644, the seventh son of the minister. When he grew up he also became a minister, since despite his family’s relative poverty he was able to study theology at St. Andrew’s University thanks to church sponsorship. Later in life he followed in his father’s footsteps, also becoming Aberfoyle’s minister.

Robert had an interest in magic, which wasn’t so uncommon as scientific study was still in its infancy, and wrote a book about magical creatures – The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies. He claimed that Doon Hill nearby was the gateway to the fairie world, and was visiting there in 1691 when he mysteriously died. His body was found and he was brought home. Some claimed that the fairies carried him away, but it more likely a heart attack.

Later he appeared as a vision in front of his cousin Graham, and claimed he would appear at Graham’s son’s christening. Graham should throw an iron dagger over him, and that would bring him back. But Graham was too afraid, and did not obey. It’s believed that Robert Kirk’s spirit is still trapped in the tree on Doon Hill, which is also called “Fairy Knowe”. Today the residents leave wishes on white cloth tied to the trees, hoping the faeries will listen.

Sir Walter Scott came to Aberfoyle in the early 19^th century, and stayed in the same Old Manse that Robert Kirk had lived in. Here he wrote a poem, The Lady of the Lake, whose descriptions of the Trossachs landscape so inspired its readers that tourism increased fivefold! Aberfoyle was gaining a new role as the ‘Gateway to the Trossachs’.

The village also features in his novel Rob Roy, about the notorious Scottish cattle thief Rob Roy MacGregor. Scott painted him as a noble figure, a Scottish Robin Hood, but the real figure was more like a mafia boss. He extorted the locals, demanding protection money so that their cattle would not be stolen, and had control over all the raiding bands in the area. He was not someone you wanted to cross.

Unfortunately for Rob Roy, he made the mistake of stealing cattle from the Duke of Montrose – not someone he wanted to cross! While he escaped, his family were thrown off the Duke’s lands. Living as an outlaw, he stayed on the outskirts of the destroyed Jacobite army after the 1715 rebellion as long as he could. He was captured in 1717 and was almost deported to Barbados until King George I pardoned him. Perhaps his time in captivity taught him a lesson, as he lived lawfully from then on. But his sons have their own story to tell…

Not only British authors found Aberfoyle inspirational. French author Jules Verne’s novel Les Indes noires (‘the Black Indies’, publishes in English as The Child of the Cavern) tells the tale of the Aberfoyle mining community, and strange happenings connected to the Aberfoyle mine.

The tourism boom initially started by Sir Walter Scott soon brought the railway to Aberfoyle, and later in 1886 “The Duke’s Road” was built here providing a link north to south through the Trossachs.

Aberfoyle today is still a tourist hub, and home to the largest ‘Go Ape’ adventure centre in the UK, hosting the country’s largest zip line. A number of the hotels and restaurants also reference the literary connections in their names. And if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, you can visit the Scottish Woollen Centre, which tells the story of how sheep’s wool is turned into clothing.

Next time we’re leaving Scotland for Wales once again, to the town of Abergavenny in Monmouthshire, a small town with many names.

References

Historical Chronology of the Early Kingdoms of Scotland, Early British Kingdoms, David Nash Ford

Welcome to Aberfoyle, Scottish Accommodation Index

GENERAL SURVEY OF SCOTLAND NORTH OF FORTH, W.J. Watson, History of the Celtic Placenames of Scotland, 1926

http://www.trossachs.co.uk/reverend-kirk.php

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofScotland/Rob-Roy-MacGregor/

 

Episode 61 – Aberford, West Yorkshire

Apologies for the lack of an episode recently. It’s been a busy time for me, meeting up with a lot of friends I haven’t seen in ages, so I’ve taken a bit longer to get all my research and writing done. Last Thursday we went on a train journey to Pitlochry, and on the way passed the tiny village of Aberargie. Anyway, let’s get on to Aberford.

Welcome to the one ‘aber’ settlement in the United Kingdom that has nothing to do with a river arriving at another body of water. But as the ‘ford’ part of the name suggests it is connected to a river crossing; this is where the Great North Road between London and Edinburgh crosses the Cock Beck. Aberford is considered to be the midpoint between the two capitals, being 200 miles from each. With the construction of the A1 providing a bypass, traffic no longer goes through the village, but it was a defining feature for hundreds of years. The village stretches long and thin along the length of the road, rather than clustering around a central location.

Aberford has two manors nearby – Parlington and Lotherton – which we will look at separately.

Aberford

The ‘aber’ part of the name hints back to Anglo-Saxon origins, in a similar vein to ‘Abberley’ or ‘Abberton’, yet in the post-Saxon Domesday Book there’s no record of the village though Parlington manor is present. The first mention of Aberford is around 1176 in the Pipe Rolls – early English financial records kept by the government. But a thousand years before this there were people living in the area.

The Great North Road has always been busy. The Romans used it, and had a garrison to the south at Castleford. There might also be a Roman fort beneath Aberford House in the village. A series of banks and ditches – the Aberford Dykes – were built to the north and south. These may have come from the early Roman period, or been added as a defensive Saxon structure.

One of the most significant signs of Saxon habitation is a golden ring found in a nearby field. It has an intricate design on the front, and the inscription inside bears the name ‘Queen AEthelswith’. It belonged to AEthelswith of Mercia, sister of Alfred the Great, as a sign of her royal office. Mercian women had more freedom and power than those of other Saxon kingdoms, so her marriage to King Burgred of Mercia in 853 or 854 would have been a change in lifestyle for her. In 874 Burgred was expelled from his kingdom by the Danes, being replaced by Ceolwulf II whom we met at Aberffraw. Burgred and AEthelswith travelled to Rome where he died soon after. She lived longer and was buried in Pavia, northern Italy, in 888.

The church in the village has Saxon stonework, and the remains of a few Saxon crosses have been found here. But like so many parish churches across Britain it was rebuilt in the 12^th Century by the Normans. It was dedicated to the Frankish monk St. Ricarius, who was born in the 6^th Century to a pagan family. Welsh missionaries converted him to Christianity, then he became a monk and travelled to England to preach to the Saxons – he’s said to have visited Aberford around 630. Later he returned to France and founded two monasteries. This is the only church dedicated to St. Ricarius in Britain.

For many centuries Aberford was a farming village, focussed on growing wheat. The Cock Beck had two watermills for corn in the 14^th Century, and there were also a few windmills around. Some of these still remain, though they have been converted into housing.

Aberford’s position on the Great North Road made it ideally positioned for royal courts as the king made his assizes around the country. It might not have been as exciting a location as the big towns and cities, but even so there are plenty of records showing decisions made here. For instance on 27 November 1300 a number of gentlemen were forced to “acknowledge that they owe to William de Crescy, the younger, 60l.; to be levied, in default of payment, of their lands and chattels in co. York.”

By the 17^th Century Aberford was home to a pin-making cottage industry. The focus was on hackle pins, which would be formed into a comb-like instrument to clean wool and hemp. It is around this time that the village began to be formed into its modern shape, in no small part thanks to the succession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne. Now that the two countries shared a ruler the people could trade and travel across the border regularly, and Aberford was an ideal stopping point on the long journey.

The industrial revolution brought with it dramatic improvements in transportation and growth in wealth. A number of grand coaching inns sprang up along the side of the road, most notably the Swan Hotel. These coaching inns are notable for their wide arched entrances, admitting the stagecoaches to the inner courtyard where people and goods could easily be unloaded. Wealthy Georgians families built grand townhouses here, so they wouldn’t have to stay in the inns.

In the 19^th Century the newest form of transport – the railway – also arrived. Aberford’s local nobility, the Gascoignes, had several limestone quarries and coal mines, and constructed the railway in 1835 to ship their product from Garforth, a few miles to the south west, to their depot at Aberford. For a time it became a thriving passenger line, but eventually closed in 1924. There’s no railway any more, and the old track is now a walking path.

With the arrival of the car, Aberford doesn’t have the same significance it used to. The journey from London to Edinburgh can easily be made in less than a day, and there’s no more need for a rest stop along the Great North Road. It continues to be recognised for its architecture, which is protected in a conservation area.

Parlington and Lotherton

At the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066 Parlington Manor was under the lordship of Earl Edwin of Mercia. Edwin’s brother was Earl of Northumbria, and their brother-in-law was King Harold of England.

1066 was a traumatic year for Britain. The previous king, Edward the Confessor, had died, and there were three claimants to the throne: Harold Godwinson, Harald Hardrada the King of Norway, and Duke William of Normandy. Harold being the only one in England, he was made king. Abroad, two armies were prepared by the other claimants, determined to have it for themselves.

Harald Hardrada landed first, on England’s north-eastern coast. He met Edwin and his brother in battle at York on 20 September 1066, defeating the Earls. Five days later, Harold’s English army arrived and destroyed the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge. The first invasion was defeated.

Harold’s army turned south, marching to meet William of Normandy’s forces at Hastings. Edwin and his brother stayed in the north. After Harold was killed they didn’t support the choice of William as the new king, instead backing the exiled Saxon prince Edgar AEthling. And if not him then either of the pair would make a good option. Edwin plotted rebellion against William, but it soon failed. He sought support from Scotland, but on his way there in 1071 he was betrayed by his own people and killed.

His lands were handed over to Norman lords, and by 1086 Parlington was held by Ilbert de Lacy. Ilbert had been just 21 at the conquest, but his loyalty to William gained him over 150 manors in West Yorkshire alone.

By the 14^th Century the manor was owned by Sir Hugh le Despenser the Younger. Hugh’s father, Hugh the Elder, had served Edward I until his death near Abbeytown in July 1307, and then served Edward II.

Edward II’s close companion (and possibly lover) Piers Gaveston was a constant thorn in the side of the barons, and over the next few years he was regularly in and out of exile from England. Hugh the Elder was one of his few supporters. But eventually in 1312 the Earl of Warwick got hold of Piers and had him tried and executed on a hill just outside of Kenilworth. This is where the village of Leek Wootton is located today, and is quite close to where I grew up.

Hugh the Elder now became Edward II’s chief adviser, but was dismissed in 1315. He now focussed his attention on his son’s rise to power, helping him to become Royal Chamberlain in 1318. Hugh the Younger had also gained status through marriage, since his wife was heiress to a great fortune of wealth and land on the Scottish borders. But his royal position began to anger the barons, and they plotted the Despensers’ downfall.

Perhaps Hugh saw the end coming. In April 1321 he granted his lands at Parlington to Sir John de Cromwell and his wife Idonia, on the condition that if they made more than 136 marks per year, the excess would return to Hugh and his heirs. This was to be a commitment over generations.

Then in August 1321 the Hughs were forced into exile. The Elder went abroad, but the Younger stayed around the British naval ports of Sandwich, Dover, Hythe, New Romney and Hastings, the ‘cinque ports’, taking up piracy.

The next year, the opposing barons were put down and the Hughs returned, but in 1326 a new rebellion was started by Edward II’s own wife Isabella and her ‘companion’ Roger Mortimer. The king fled, the Despensers sticking with him. The Elder was put in charge over Bristol, while the Younger stayed with his king.

Isabella soon forced Bristol’s surrender, and Hugh the Elder was quickly tried and executed. Edward II and Hugh the Younger were captured, and Hugh was held for a month before being hung, drawn and quartered. Thus ended the Despensers.

Parlington’s new owner, John de Cromwell, was a constable of the Tower of London. He remained in parliament until his death in 1335. He and his wife sadly seem not to have had any children, so the manor would have been returned to the crown before new owners were found. Under the feudal system all land actually belonged to the king, and the lords of each manor were merely holding it for him.

In 1545 John Gascoigne purchased Parlington Manor from one Thomas Wentworth. This is confirmed by an alienation license granted in 1546 during the reign of Edward VI. The family had previously lived elsewhere in Yorkshire, but moved their chief manor to Parlington at this time. The family has been closely connected to Aberford ever since.

The reformation had taken place in England just twenty years previously under the rule of Henry VIII. While most English converted, the Gascoignes were one of the few holdouts, and remained Catholic until the 18^th Century despite strict penalties. Many of them would take holy orders in Europe, where Catholicism remained strong.

A number of Gascoignes were forced to pay fines for ‘recusancy’ – refusing to follow the protestant religion. It was a legal requirement to attend Church of England services each week, and to take protestant communion three times a year. Poorer families who remained Catholic could not afford the fines of £20 per month for disobeying (£2,000 today), so attended anyway. Only wealthy families like the Gascoignes could be open about their beliefs.

Sir Thomas Gascoigne was head of the family during and after the Civil War, and like most Catholics they were Royalists. This brought further financial burden on the family as they were fined for their support, and had to mortgage their property to cover the cost. Many of these fines were forgiven by Charles II when he was restored to the throne in 1660.

The years following the English republic were troubled, particularly for Catholics. They made up just 1% of the British population, and like minorities throughout history were viewed with suspicion. King Charles himself was suspected to be a closet Catholic thanks to his Catholic wife and residence in Catholic France during his exile. When he became king he tried to fight against the recusancy laws but with some difficulty.

Into this arena stepped one Titus Oates. He claimed that the Jesuit order were orchestrating a ‘Popish Plot’ to assassinate Charles II so that his brother James could take the throne. Over the period of the conspiracy over 100 people would be accused, including Thomas Gascoigne.

At first the plot wasn’t so high on the public agenda. The king himself didn’t buy it, as he recognised discrepancies in the story, but one who did was Sir Edmund Geoffrey Berry, a magistrate. He took note of the evidence and went to look into it. Then… he vanished. A few days later, on 17 October 1678, his body turned up in a ditch on Primrose Hill, strangled and stabbed through with his own sword.

It was the catalyst needed to fire the public up. Jesuits were rounded up and Catholics were banned from London for a radius of 20 miles. Processions were held through the streets burning effigies of the pope.

Many people were put on trial for their supposed part in the plot, including many priests who were respected members of their communities. 23 were executed and 7 more died in prison. Titus Oates even claimed that the queen was in on the plot, and had asked her physician to poison her husband. When the physician went on trial the judge had to tread very carefully to get him off without challenging the veracity of the plot.

But by now the plot was starting to fall apart. As Titus brought in more informers to put forward ‘evidence’ discrepancies began to appear. And of course the supposed threat of assassination to the king was never realised. Thomas Gascoigne himself was put to trial in 1680 but was acquitted, in part thanks to his age.

Titus Oates was arrested in 1784 and convicted of perjury. He was fined a gigantic £100,000 and imprisoned. Two later trials saw him put in the pillory and whipped through the streets. When William III came to the throne he pardoned Titus and gave him a small pension, and he lived into the 1720s.

As for Thomas Gascoigne, his family continued to live at Parlington Hall until 1905, when they moved to Lotherton Hall on the other side of Aberford. Both manors were used by the military during World War I, then Parlington was abandoned and fell into ruin. Later some of the buildings were demolished.

A branch of the Gascoignes first began to live at Lotherton Hall in 1825. In 1893 Richard Gascoigne took ownership after his aunt died, and once his father Frederick died in 1905 it was he who moved their residence away from Parlington.

His wife Gwendolyn took full advantage, and designed beautiful gardens surrounding the property. It was used as a military hospital during World War I, and in 1968 was given by Sir Alvery Gascoigne and his wife to the City of Leeds.

Following his service during World War I, Sir Alvery became a diplomat, eventually being appointed first secretary in the Foreign Office in 1933. Then World War II arrived, and he was posted to Tangier in Morocco. Following the war he was the British Political Representative in Japan until 1951, and then stationed for a time in Moscow.

Sadly he didn’t live much longer after his donation of Lotherton Hall, and died in 1970 at the age of 86.

Next week we’ll be back in Scotland, in Aberfoyle, for more British history.

References

Aberford Conservation Area Appraisal and Management Plan (May 2011), Leeds Council

Aethelswith Ring, British Museum Collection Online

Place: Parlington, Domesday Online

Ilbert de Lacy, Elizabeth Ashworth

‘Close Rolls, Edward II: April 1321’, in Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward II: Volume 3, 1318-1323, ed. H C Maxwell Lyte (London, 1895), pp. 365-370. British History Online (£)

Parlington Hall, Brian Hull

GASCOIGNE, John II (by 1537-1602), of Parlington, Yorks, The House of Commons, 1509-1558, Volume 1, Stanley Thomas Bindoff, Boydell and Brewer, 1982

Titus Oates and his ‘Popish Plot’, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4

Things to do and see, Lotherton Hall, Leeds Council

 

Episode 60 – Aberffraw, Anglesey – Part 2

Around the 9^th Century there was something big going on in North West Europe. The king of the Franks, Charles, died in 814. For the last fourteen years of his life he was Holy Roman Emperor. After his death he would be known as Charles the Great, Charlemagne.

Towards the end of the century a king would arise in the Saxon kingdom of Wessex, whose rule so inspired his people that he would become known as Alfred the Great.

And in Gwynedd in 844 Merfyn Frych died and was succeeded by his 24-year-old son Rhodri. Before his time Gwynedd was a minor kingdom whose greatest fame came as an ally to Mercia in Northumbria. But in his lifetime he would bring his land to greatness, and his people would call him Rhodri the Great, Rhodri Mawr.

Rhodri

In 836 the Viking invaders had taken the Isle of Man. All across the British Isles the coasts were being ravaged as the ‘great heathen army’ set their sights on these islands’ treasures. Anglesey was hit in 854, the seafaring Danes finding it easy to access the island. They were called by the Welsh ‘black gentiles’.

Perhaps it was greed for land, or perhaps Rhodri saw a need for the Welsh to be united in face of this threat. In 855 he took his chance on the death of his uncle Cyngen ap Cadell, king of Powys, and seized the throne.

Cyngen had been king of Powys for a long time. During his lifetime he’d seen a rift between the Catholic and Celtic churches over the dating of Easter healed, and now he was making the first pilgrimage to Rome of any Welsh king since that time. It was while away in Rome that he died. One of his three sons should have inherited the throne of Powys. Instead Rhodri took it, annexing the kingdom to become part of Gwynedd.

Their strengthened forces took the battle to the Vikings, and Rhodri himself killed their leader Gorm in battle in 856. After this there were no attacks on North Wales for 20 years – maybe he was just too big a threat for them, and the Saxons were an easier target. So Gwynedd had peace from the Vikings.

It was around 870 or 871 that Rhodri’s brother-in-law Gwgon, king of Ceredigion, drowned. Gwgon had no heir, so Rhodri was able to push for his son Cadell to be made king of Ceredigion, with himself as steward. Thus Rhodri became sovereign over a large swathe of Wales with only the south free from his rule.

That same year the Vikings returned, but Rhodri defeated them in two decisive battles at Anglesey and a place called ‘Manegid’.

Saxon Trouble

It was during this century that the great heathen army decided they liked Britain enough that they want to do more than raiding. Instead, they began conquering the land and settling here. Soon they were in control of many east British kingdoms. Some of the Saxons fought back. Others saw where their bread was buttered, and made alliances to protect themselves.

One of these was King Ceolwulf II of Mercia, who had formed a treaty with the Danish king Guthrum. Mercia was now free from attack, while their rival Wessex was kept busy. Mercia could now focus their attention on their rivals to the west and crossed the border into Rhodri’s lands.

It was either in 873 or 877 – the Welsh Annals contradict each other over the dates – that Ceolwulf invaded Wales. Rhodri and his brother Gwriad led the forces against the Saxons and were slain. Gwynedd may well have been forced to submit to Mercia and become one of their sub-kingdoms.

Rhodri’s sons Anarawd, Cadell and Merfyn inherited the thrones of Gwynedd, Ceredigion and Powys respectively under a system called gavelkind where the inheritance was split between all heirs. Cadell wasn’t satisfied with his portion and killed Merfyn to gain Powys’s throne for himself as well. But Anarawd was the most notable of the sons of Rhodri. It is at this time that his dynasty is founded and called the ‘House of Aberffraw’.

In 880 Alfred also signed a treaty with Guthrum, though this was in Wessex’s favour as they had been getting the advantage of the Danes. Under the terms of the treaty Mercia was divided in two, half Saxon and half Dane. It is also around this time that Ceolwulf disappears as king of Mercia, to be replaced by AEthelred. Certainly it was AEthelred who, in 881, led the Mercians back into Gwynedd for further battle either as king or war leader, perhaps to suppress a rebellion. This time Anarawd won out, asserting his kingdom’s independence in a great victory that was regarded as ‘God’s vengeance for Rhodri’.

I’m sure there are some of you out there asking what right Alfred had to divide Mercia when it wasn’t his land. We know that AEthelred submitted to Alfred some time at the end of the 870s or during the 880s, and it’s possible that this division was taken after Mercia became a sub-kingdom of Wessex. But if that’s the case then Mercia’s attack on Gwynedd was also done under Alfred’s instruction. Not exactly something he’d want to shout about, especially to his Welsh biographer. Perhaps that’s why the dates are so unclear.

In this decade the island of Great Britain had three great powers outside of Scotland – the Danes, the Saxons and the Welsh. Anarawd knew that both the Saxons and Danes would be dangerous foes, so he formed an alliance with the Northumbrian Danes to reduce the threat to Gwynedd. Only a few small, independent kingdoms remained in the south of Wales, and all of them faced regular attacks from Gwynedd and Mercia.

The alliance with Northumbria didn’t work out for Anarawd, and by 893 he’d shifted to Wessex. Alfred received him with honour and was appointed as his godfather. Gwynedd became a sub-kingdom on a level with Mercia. Anarawd used this to his advantage and turned on his brother Cadell in Ceredigion.

Gwynedd in turmoil

Anarawd’s son Idwal Foel succeeded him as ruler of Gwynedd in 916. Cadell’s son Hywel Dda succeeded him as ruler of Ceredigion, and also the south western kingdom of Dyfed. He would combine these into the greater kingdom of Deheubarth. Idwal led a rebellious life against his overlords and was eventually killed in 942 and his sons expelled. Hywel was placed on Gwynedd’s throne.

Hywel ruled over almost all of Wales. Like his ancestor Rhodri he was considered a great king, and his name ‘Hywel Dda’ means ‘Hywel the Good’. Following his succession in Gwynedd he gathered together six representatives of each commote – that is, a smaller division of land than the cantref (or hundred) – and held a great conference in Dyfed, which he seems to have regarded as his home base.

Together they devised the ‘Laws of Hywel the Good’ in three parts – the law of the daily court, law of the land, and the customs of each land. These were made into three copies, one for the court at Dynevor in Dyfed, one for his daily court as he travelled around the country, and one for the court at Aberffraw. So wherever he went there would always be a copy of the law.

Hywel’s reign marks one of the few times that Wales has been a united independent country. His impact helped establish the idea of a single country of Wales, rather than many different kingdoms. But it was not to last, as after his death, the principle of gavelkind saw these lands divided once again.

Idwal’s elder sons Iago and Ieuaf were restored as joint monarchs of Gwynedd, but they immediately fell into civil war. Iago defeated his brother in 969, and appears in 973 at the court of King Edgar of England in Chester, showing Gwynedd was still considered a sub-kingdom of England.

Ieuaf’s son Hywel came back against his uncle, imprisoning him in 979 and making himself king of Gwynedd. He died shortly afterwards in 985, and though his brother Cadwallon succeeded him, he then died the next year. This was the end of the lines of Iago and Ieuaf, so the inheritance of Gwynedd went to Idwal’s younger son Meurig.

Continuing over the next century the House of Aberffraw held a tenuous grasp on the throne of Gwynedd. From time to time they would achieve the throne, but soon some usurper would take over, kill the previous incumbent, and rule themselves. It seems incredible that the dynasty could survive through this, but somehow it managed. When each usurper died, Aberffraw would be restored until the next time.

So it continued to the time of Cynan ap Iago. Cynan’s father had managed to rule Gwynedd for six years, from 1033 to 1039, until he was murdered by his own men and Gruffydd ap Llywelyn took the throne. Cynan fled to Ireland to live with the Danes of Dublin, marrying into their royal line. He never managed to take back the throne, though he tried twice, and died in exile around 1060.

Cynan’s son was born around 1055, so he did not know his father well. It’s said that his mother told him his legacy, and in 1075 he crossed the Irish Sea to regain his patrimony. Thus began the reign of Gruffydd ap Cynan, and at last the House of Aberffraw would have a stable rule.

This is a name we have encountered numerous times during our alphabetical adventure around Britain. Some of the details of Gruffydd and his descendants are familiar to us, particularly the alliances and battles between Gwynedd and her southern neighbour Deheubarth led by Rhys ap Tewdwr. And the kingdom will eventually become the last man standing in the fight for freedom against the Normans, until Llywelyn the Last meets his end at Aberedw. We have already covered this in some detail, and no doubt will revisit these events again, so I won’t be going any further this episode.

Following the end of Gwynedd, the palace at Aberffraw fell into ruins. Today the village is just a shadow of its former self, with just a few hundred residents where once was royalty and splendour.

The church in the sea

West of Aberffraw, on an island in the sea reachable only at low tide via a causeway, is St. Cwyfan’s Church. 1400 years ago when it was constructed it was on the mainland, and since then the slow erosion of the sea has worn away the land around it.

St. Cwyfan – or Kevin – was born in 498 in Ireland. He trained as a monk, and after his ordination moved to the remote valley of Glendalough in County Wicklow, south east Ireland, where he lived as a hermit in a cave. This was a common path to take, and those who isolated themselves were seen as particularly holy.

Though Kevin would not be isolated for long. Visitors came from all around to learn from him, and his particular disciples built a small settlement by the nearby lake. Glendalough Abbey would eventually grow into a renowned seminary where numerous saints and scholars trained.

Later in life Kevin travelled, perhaps even to Aberffraw where stories say he settled and taught the native Britons about Christianity, beginning a church for them to be educated in. That early building would have been made of wattle and daub – not the most durable materials for a church by the sea, but they were readily accessible.

But for the majority of his life Kevin lived in Glendalough, and he did not stay away for long before returning, remaining in the abbey until his death in 618, aged 120. Today he is known as the patron saint of blackbirds.

In the 12^th century the Normans underwent a massive program of rebuilding and reconsecrating churches, and St. Cwyfan’s was completely redone in stone. This is also the time when it was first named after the saint.

The island of Cribiniau, on which the church sits, remained a peninsula of the mainland into the 17^th Century. Towards the end of that century the construction of the causeway began, as the sea finally came between the church and the people. Time and tide pay no heed to church services, and sometimes these had to be held at a house on the mainland instead.

In 1766 Dr. Thomas Bowles was appointed to St. Cwyfan’s as parish priest of Trefdraeth by the Diocese of Bangor. Unfortunately they failed to take into account that Dr. Bowles spoke no Welsh, and just a handful of his congregation spoke any English. A complaint was raised, and eventually heard in the 1773 ecclesiastical court. The judge ruled that the appointment had been an error, and Welsh-speaking parishes should have Welsh-speaking priests, but seeing as he was already appointed there he should remain until the end of his term. It was a mixed blessing for the people that he would die later that year, allowing them to have a more appropriate priest as replacement.

By the 19^th Century the church was in ruins, and the graveyard was starting to collapse into the sea. Local architect Harold Hughes was concerned for the building and raised money towards its restoration, including constructing a protective seawall around it, in 1893. Further restoration took place in 2006.

 

On regular occasions throughout the year the sound of engines can be heard filling the air to the south west of Aberffraw. This is the Anglesey Circuit, which regularly hosts racing events and has also been used by Channel Five’s motoring program Fifth Gear for their ‘shoot outs’, pitting similar vehicles against each other in a race.

 

So far all of our ‘Aber’ towns have been in the Celtic/Pictish areas of Wales and Scotland. But next week we’re visiting England. What’s up with that?! Find out as we take a trip to Aberford, near Leeds.

References

Rhodri Mawr, English Monarchs [even though he’s Welsh…]

ANARAWD ap RHODRI (d. 916 ), prince ., Sir John Edward Lloyd, D.Litt., F.B.A., F.S.A. (1861-1947), Bangor, 1959, Dictionary of Welsh Biography

The Sons of Rhodri and Aethelred’s Beautiful Hair, The British History Podcast Episode 234, Jamie Jeffers, 3 March 2017

HYWEL DDA ( Hywel the Good ) (d. 950 ), king and legislator ., Professor Stephen Joseph Williams, D.Litt., (1896-1992), Swansea, 1959, Dictionary of Welsh Biography

CYNAN ap IAGO (d. 1060? ), exiled prince , Sir John Edward Lloyd, D.Litt., F.B.A., F.S.A. (1861-1947), Bangor, 1959, Dictionary of Welsh Biography

Llangwyfan – St Cwyfan’s Church, Warren Kovach, Anglesey History

ST CWYFAN CHURCH IN THE SEA, William Jones, Anglesey Hidden Gem

Episode 60 – Aberffraw, Isle of Anglesey – Part 1

Good time of day faithful readers, how are you doing? This weekend I’m visiting Carlisle with my wonderful fiancé, so I’ve been working hard to get this blog done on time while keeping it up to my usual standards.

While it’s Carlisle in the real world, we’re on the Isle of Anglesey (Ynys Mon) in the blog world. This island is the heartland of the ancient kingdom of Gwynedd, whose origins date back to the fifth century, and Aberffraw was its capital. This island achieved such prominence due to its natural defence in the Menai Strait that separates it from the mainland. I have chosen to use Anglesey rather than Ynys Mon simply because it is most commonly known by this name throughout the world.

But before we reach the royal line of Gwynedd, lets go even further back in time, to the early British settlers who set aside their hunter-gatherer existence for a settled farming life. Anglesey has numerous neolithic monuments, many of them burial tombs that show hints of the people’s lives and beliefs.

One of these tombs is north-west of the village. It’s called ‘Barclodiad y Gawres’, the ‘giantess’s apronful’, overlooking the Irish Sea. A mound of grassy earth covers the large burial site, only accessible through a 7m long passageway on the north side. The passageway and cross-shaped centre are lined by several large stones, which hold up the earth overhead. They are etched with abstract shapes – curves, spirals and zig-zags – which would have taken hundreds of hours of dedicated work to complete.

The human remains found inside show signs of cremation, a common Neolithic practice. There’s also signs of a fire on which a ‘magic potion’ of eel, frog, toad and other animals was thrown. Was this some kind of sacred ritual?

Over the millennia stories have built up around these ancient stones, as those who lived nearby asked themselves where they could have come from, not believing any person could create such a thing. Legends tell of a giant couple who decided to make Anglesey their home. They carried several large stones with them that they would build their house from. The man carried two large stones for the entrance, while the woman carried smaller stones in her apron.

They’d been walking for a long time, and were getting tired. Spotting a cobbler coming the other way, they asked how much further they had to go. He lied and said it was still a long distance. Frustrated, the giantess dumped her burden of rocks on the ground. And there they remain to this day.

The House of Aberffraw

For much of the early history of the kings of Gwynedd we know very little. Where we know more the stories are legendary, or come from outside sources where Gwynedd was interacting with the other kingdoms. Some of the stories were handed down for many generations before they were written down, and have changed in the telling. While I’m presenting the stories here as if they were factual, you should take them with a pinch of salt.

The ancestor of the first kings of Gwynedd was Cunedda, a chieftain of north Britain around 380 CE. His mother was descended from Welsh kings, while his father’s family may have come to the island with the Romans and served north of Hadrian’s Wall.

It was at this time that the Scotti of Ireland invaded north Wales, and the Welsh called on Cunedda to rescue them. He heeded the call, and “with great slaughter they drove out from those regions the Scotti who never returned again to inhabit them.” Anglesey, the Llyn Peninsula and a few other small areas remained in Irish hands. As for Cunedda, he was made king over much of Wales.

Cunedda had nine sons, though the firstborn died in his homeland and never came to Wales with his father. The other eight were Meirion, Ysfael, Rhufon, Dunod, Ceredig, Afloeg, Einion Yrth, Dogfael and Edern. These children became the ancestors of many of the Welsh royal lineages, and each received a portion of their father’s Welsh lands as an inheritance.

Gwynedd’s royal line descended from Einion Yrth. His eldest son Cadwallon Lawhir (or ‘long hand’) was the first Welsh-born of the kings. His name comes from his very long arms; apparently he could “reach a stone from the ground to kill a raven, without bending his back, because his arm was as long as his side to the ground.”

Cadwallon joined forces with his cousins to finally expel the Irish from all their Welsh lands, most notably their power base in Anglesey. The effort was completed by 517, culminating in the death of the Irish leader as he attempted to retreat.

Soon Gwynedd’s Royal Court had been moved to Aberffraw, where it would remain until the 13^th Century when Llywelyn the Last was killed by the English at Aberedw.

Maelgwn

Cadwallon’s son Maelgwn was born in 480. He murdered his uncle Owain to ensure he got Gwynedd’s crown, an act which gained him much disapproval from Gildas, a Welsh monk who sent many furious letters to the Welsh kings trying to get them to be more Christian. On the other hand, Gildas also complimented him with the honorific ‘Dragon of the Isle’, referring to Anglesey.

After his succession as king, Maelgwn gathered all the kings of north Wales together to persuade them he should be their over-king. He held a competition – everyone would sit on chairs along the shore, and whoever stayed longest before the coming high tide would be high king. They all sat, and one-by-one all the other kings of Wales had to escape. But Maelgwyn had coated his chair with waxed bird wings, and when the high tide came his chair floated. Thus Maelgwn won the challenge and became high king.

Maelgwn seems to have been quite a trickster, who would make gains for himself through deception and others’ misfortune. He’d heard that the Bishop of Llanbadarn had a huge pile of gold, and decided he wanted it for himself. He sent messengers to the bishop asking him to take care of some of the royal treasury for a while. When they came back a few months later to retrieve the treasure, they found only piles of stones and moss.

As you might have guessed, it was Maelgwn who had planted the false treasure. If the bishop was found guilty, he could claim that it was his own wealth he was retrieving and thus increase his wealth by deceitful means. So the bishop was brought to trial.

But this was no trial by jury, with evidence and eyewitness statements. This was a trial by ordeal, where both parties would plunge their arms into boiling water, giving themselves terrible burns. Whichever recovered faster would be considered innocent. When the bishop’s arms were examined they had been completely healed, while his accusers were still scarred. Maelgwn was forced to admit his plot.

Maelgwn’s first wife was Princess Nesta of the Southern Pennines. He gave her a beautiful golden ring worn by all the queens of Gwynedd, but she lost it while bathing on the Elwy. She knew Maelgwn would be unhappy, so in a panic, she went to Bishop Asaph to ask what she should do. He invited the couple to dinner that evening, and explained what had happened to the ring. Maelgwn was furious at his wife, accusing her of giving it to an impoverished lover. But then the bishop cut open the fish they were to eat for dinner and there was the ring inside!

It is certainly an interesting comment on Maelgwn’s character that he is always losing out to holy men.

Many kings in those days chose to end their days by abdicating their thrones and going to live in a monastery. Maelgwn tried to do this, but it wasn’t in his nature. Soon he was back in the secular world, where he murdered his second wife and nephew, then married his nephew’s widow!

Around 549 a terrible plague was sweeping through the country. He tried to flee from it but was too late. Despite protestations and prayers to God he died a few days later, and was succeeded by his illegitimate son Rhun Hir.

His legitimate daughter, Eurgain, challenged this position. Her husband Elidyr Mwynfawr of Strathclyde brought war to Gwynedd, sailing his armies down the Menai Straits to land near Caernarfon. But Gwynedd supported Rhun and defeated the army from the north. A second rebellion from Elidyr’s cousin was also defeated a few years later. Rhun brought his own army back to the north of Britain to set his half brother on the Pictish throne.

We don’t know much about Rhun’s successors – his son Beli, grandson Iago and great-grandson Cadfan. Cadfan is notable for his support of St. Beuno, a Welsh missionary who is said to have raised seven people from the dead, and there’s a church dedicated to him not far from Aberffraw. Cadfan is buried at Llangadwaladr, a village to the north west of the capital.

Cadwallon

When the Anglo Saxons took over south Britain at the end of the 5^th Century, the culture underwent great change. For a time many of the Saxon kingdoms were pagan, though they later converted to Christianity. The Mercian king Penda was the last hold out against this change, but that didn’t stop Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd from forming an alliance with him.

He’d become king after his father’s death in 613, coinciding with the Battle of Chester when the kingdom of Northumbria was pushing its territorial boundaries. Edwin, king of Northumbria, campaigned across the island as far south as Wessex and as far west as Anglesey. In 629 he forced Cadwallon out of Anglesey, and he had to seek shelter in Ireland.

Then Cadwallon reached out to Penda and they fought back together against Edwin, defeating him in 630. The campaign continued until in 633 they had killed Edwin and his son Osfrith at Hatfield Chase in South Yorkshire. Northumbria was severely weakened.

Enfrith of Bernicia – one of Northumbria’s sub-kingdoms – had been living in Pictland, outside of Saxon control. He tried to negotiate a peace with Cadwallon and Penda, but they wouldn’t listen and Cadwallon killed Enfrith. Now Enfrith’s half-brother Oswald also came south. They met in battle and Cadwallon was slain.

Northumbrian scribe and holy man Bede had nothing good to say about the Welsh king.

…though he bore the name and professed himself a Christian, was so barbarous in his disposition and behaviour, that he neither spared the female sex, nor the innocent age of children, but with savage cruelty put them to tormenting deaths, ravaging all their country for a long time, and resolving to cut off all the race of the English within the borders of Britain.

Well, Bede might have been a bit biased. Other Saxon kingdoms seem to have appreciated being liberated from Northumbrian conquest, and a later king of Wessex was named after Cadwallon.

His death in 634 caused a power vacuum in Gwynedd. His son Cadwaladr was just one year old, and unable to rule. Enter Cadfael Cadomedd. His origins are unknown, but he secured his position quickly. He would reign for thirty years over Gwynedd, continuing the alliance with Penda and helping to defeat Oswald.

Oswald’s son Oswiu had succeeded him as king of Northumbria, and continued the war. In 655 the two sides met in battle at the Winwaed. On the one side, Oswiu; on the other, Penda and his allies. But Penda’s army was weakened by desertions, and even Gwynedd left the night before the battle began. The tide was turned in Northumbria’s favour and Penda was slain, marking the end of paganism in Saxon Britain as his son and heir Peada was Christian. Penda had been a great and powerful king, and his loss allowed the Northumbrians to advance once more.

As for Gwynedd, the reign of Cadfael saw famine, plague and civil war across the kingdom. Many supported Cadwaladr’s right to be king despite his age. He was kept safe until the time came when Cadfael died, probably thanks to one of the plagues.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, the British scribe, relates the tradition that he was kept safe in Brittany under the hospitality of Alain Hir. The Welsh and Bretons would have spoken the same language in those days, so this would make sense. After Cadfael’s death Cadwaladr and his son Ifwr returned to Gwynedd to secure the throne.

Like Maelgwn, he spent his final years in a monastery. Unlike Maelgwn, he kept it up. He died in November 682 while on pilgrimage to Rome, and his body returned to Wales for burial. His son succeeded him.

It wasn’t many generations before history repeated itself. Cadwaladr’s grandson Rhodri was killed in 754 when Caradog Meirion staged a coup, seizing the throne of Gwynedd. Rhodri’s son Cynan was fourteen, but like Cadwaladr had to keep his head down.

Caradog reigned a long time, during which Gwynedd suffered under regular Mercian attacks, their former ally expanding their borders again. He was defeated and killed by Coenwulf of Mercia in 798, in Snowdonia.

Cynan was now sixty, and immediately assumed his place as king of Gwynedd by descent from Rhodri. But many in Gwynedd had come to accept Caradog’s place as their king, and believed his thirteen-year-old son Hywel should have the throne. Because of his age, the simmering tension didn’t really break out until 813. And then Gwynedd was in civil war.

At first Cynan was winning, then Hywel got the upper hand and drove him out of Anglesey. Cynan’s daughter Essylt had married the king of the Isle of Man, so that was where he fled. He attempted a fightback two years later and was killed.

It seemed this would be the end of the line of Cunedda. Hywel might have come from an usurping line, but with all Cynan’s descendants on the Isle of Man he just needed to have heirs of his own to ensure his dynasty would succeed. He ruled Gwynedd peacefully for nine years, but failed in that one task. When he died in 825 Gwynedd looked to see who would be her next ruler.

King Merfyn Frych of Man was the son of Queen Essylt. He’d already inherited his father’s throne and now he crossed the Irish Sea to take Gwynedd, becoming joint ruler of both kingdoms. He chose to reign from Anglesey, but this left the Isle of Man open to invasion from a new threat – the Vikings. In 836 the island was lost, never to be recovered, and Merfyn was King of Gwynedd only. In 844 he died, and his son Rhodri Mawr succeeded him.

Thus ends the first part of the history of Gwynedd. The kingdom has stood for 400 years, surviving invasions, civil war, and plague. Next week we’ll see how it continued to grow, and then became the last holdout against the Normans.

But that’s not all, because we’ll also visit one of Anglesey’s most iconic churches, St. Cwyfan’s, “the church in the sea”, before we return to the 21^st Century for some high-speed action. See you next week!

References

Barclodiad y Gawres: The Original “Awesome”, Anglesey Heritage

The early Kingdom and Sub Kingdoms of Gwynedd 450 – 950, The History of Wales

Cunedda Wledig, King of North Wales, Early British Kingdoms

Cadwallon Lawhir, King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

Maelgwn Gwynedd, King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

Rhun Hir, King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

Cadwallon, King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

Cadfael Cadomedd, King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

St. Cadwaladr Fendigaid,King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

Caradog, King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

Hywel Farf-Fehinog, King of Gwynedd, Early British Kingdoms

Merfyn Frych, King of Gwynedd & Ynys Manaw, Early British Kingdoms

 

Episode 59 – Aberfeldy, Perth and Kinross

We’ve been hit by a huge snowstorm this week in the UK, closing my work’s office and giving me plenty of time at home to work on this blog post. It’s been a while since we had snow this bad, stopping buses and trains from running. Although I’ve been enjoying the change of pace, it’s been driving me stir-crazy, and it will be good to have a longer period out of the house once it starts melting.

We’re taking a break from Wales to visit the Perthshire town of Aberfeldy. We’re right on the edge of the Highlands here, and as the name might suggest it’s where two rivers meet – the Moness Burn joining the River Tay. The Moness used to be known as the ‘Pheallaidh’ (or ‘Feldy’) Burn, which is why this isn’t Abermoness we’re talking about.

This remote location is outstandingly beautiful, so much that it inspired Scots poet Robert Burns:

Now Simmer blinks on flowery braes,
And o’er the crystal streamlets plays;
Come let us spend the lightsome days,
In the birks of Aberfeldy.

The town has embraced the poem so much that the former cinema here is called the ‘Birks’, and there’s a circular walk along the burn called the ‘Birks of Aberfeldy’, passing through the birks – that is, the birch trees. It leads up to the top of Moness Gorge, where a waterfall makes its way down nearly 400 metres in three sections. Its unique botanic life has helped declare it a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

While Aberfeldy itself is a recent settlement, just a few miles downriver there are 4,000 year old human dwellings. These are ‘crannogs’, huts built on stilts over the water of Loch Tay. Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a crannog village with eighteen huts, and some of these have been reconstructed to give visitors a taste of ancient human life.

Aberfeldy’s start, meanwhile, came as a result of the Jacobite rebellions in the 18^th Century. The first rebellion in 1715 had caused great concern to the British government, and with no desire to see history repeat itself began a plan of pacification around the Highlands.

The man appointed to lead this plan was General George Wade, who had made his career in the army since the age of seventeen. His early postings in Europe saw him rise up the ranks, and by 1710 he’d become a Major General. This was in the War of Spanish Succession, following the death of the last Hapsburg Emperor, where many of the countries of the Spanish Empire seized the opportunity to rebel and find independence. Britain supported these countries, most notably the Netherlands, and joined in the battle. It was during this conflict that Gibraltar became British, and modern Europe began to take shape.

Soon after the British Army returned home from the war, the Jacobites rose up. General Wade helped to counter a number of plots, and arrested Abbots Ripton’s own Charles Caesar alongside the Swedish ambassador, thus foiling the Swedish conspiracy to help the Jacobites.

In 1722 he became MP for Bath, and then in 1724 was made Commander in Chief for North Britain (that is, Scotland). The general was to make a full inspection of the Highlands, then provide recommendations as to how the pacification would work. Part of his strategy included a grand construction campaign, providing new infrastructure such as barracks, roads and bridges to allow the army to easily navigate this treacherous landscape.

Over 250 miles of road were built across Scotland, and one of these would cross the River Tay at Aberfeldy. General Wade seems to have particularly liked this location, as he commissioned architect William Adam to design the bridge here. The Tay Bridge at Aberfeldy cost £4,000, and would be the single most expensive construction on the network. It would eventually be finished in 1734. This was the beginning of the town.

With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the plan of pacification was not a success. The Jacobites rebelled once more in 1745, and General Wade was sent against them. British hopes were so high that the new national anthem even added a verse calling him out by name, of how he would ‘like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush’. Needless to say, we don’t sing that bit any more.

And that may be just as well, since he missed the Jacobite army altogether. Misreading their intentions, he was in the wrong place to intercept them, leaving a wide-open path to London. He was removed from his position and replaced by the Duke of Cumberland, who pushed the rebels back to Scotland and defeat them at Culloden Moor. George Wade died in 1748, leaving a substantial fortune. Some of this was used to construct a memorial to him at Westminster Abbey.

Roads, bridges and barracks were good for getting people around, but what the British really needed was local support. And there were plenty of Highlanders loyal to the Hanoverian crown who were happy to help. Dressed in dark tartan, they were to keep an eye on the rebels. Thus they gained the name the ‘Black Watch’. In 1739 they were officially formed into a foot regiment, “the men to be natives of that country, and none other to be taken”. Their first regimental parade took place at Aberfeldy.

The Black Watch have long outlasted the purpose for which they were originally created, and are still a key part of the British Armed Forces to this day. Indeed, in 1887 a memorial was dedicated to them at Aberfeldy. Young men join the Black Watch inspired by their name and history, amongst their number my fiance’s best friend Scott who was killed while serving in the Black Watch in Iraq.

Moness House is one of the older buildings in the area. Constructed in 1758 as a hunting lodge, it was bought in 1787 by the Earl of Breadalbane and Holland. Breadalbane is the name of the local Perthshire area, and Holland is a region of Lincolnshire, England, not the Netherlands. I don’t believe the Earls actually owned any English land, the title being one of inheritance rather than fact.

John Campbell was just nineteen when he inherited his Earldom in 1782. While English Earls automatically had a seat in the House of Lords, this wasn’t the case in Scotland. Instead the Scottish lords elected sixteen peers between them, and in 1784 he was given that opportunity. He must have been a man of science as well as politics, because he was appointed to the Royal Society in the same year.

In 1793 John raised up a fencible regiment – that is, a defensive regiment to protect Britain against invasion, freeing up regular army regiments for offensive work. Fencible regiments were also seen in British colonies, for instance during the American War of Independence. The 2,300 men of the Breadalbane Fencibles – most of them locals – saw service in Ireland from 1795 to 1802 under John’s leadership, which coincided with the Irish rebellion led by Wolfe Tone. More on that some other time. In 1799 they presented him with a ceremonial sword, inscribed “1799 Presented by the Non Commissioned Officers and Private Soldiers of the 2d Batt 4th Fen.le Infy to their Col. the Earl of Breadal-bane As A Testimony of their Esteem for his Person and Respect for his Noble liberal and Soldierlike conduct while serving with them in Ireland.”

He rose up the ranks both militarily and in nobility. In 1806 he was created Baron Breadalbane of Taymouth Castle, granting him a seat in the House of Lords of his own accord. In 1831 he was made Marquess of Breadalbane, and died at Taymouth Castle three years later.

Moness House remained with the family until 1921, and today it is a four star hotel.

Aberfeldy doesn’t have a long history, and there haven’t been many events of significance here yet, but there’s a few interesting places that are worth a visit.

Aberfeldy Water Mill The original mill was built on the Moness Burn in 1740, by the Second Earl of Breadalbane John Campbell. It was sold on to private ownership in 1771, and rebuilt in 1825 – the structure that still stands today. Its main purpose was grinding oats into oatmeal.

In the 1980s ownership changed hands. It underwent restoration, being rebuilt as a heritage site, and the wheel was converted to supply hydro electric power. There is now an award-winning bookshop here.

The Parish Church As we’ve previously discovered, the Church of Scotland underwent a split in 1843 over the right of the church to appoint their own ministers, rather than landowners. Here in Aberfeldy there was a sizeable population who joined the Free Church of Scotland, and by November 1843 had laid the foundation stone for the first purpose-build Free Church building in the country. Interestingly it was Lord Breadalbane who laid the stone, showing that not all those with the state right to appoint ministers believed they should have it. Aberfeldy Free Church would more recently reconcile its differences with the Church of Scotland, and no longer exists as a separate entity in the town.

Dewar’s Distillery Back when we visited Aberdalgie we mentioned the Dewar family, of whisky fame, who became Lairds of Dupplin in 1911. But it was here at Aberfeldy that they began their journey in 1898. The distillery here has been operational for 120 years, and you can still visit today.

Aberfeldy Around the World

Though a young town, Aberfeldy is a name that has been transported around the world to a dockside area of London, and the state of Victoria in Australia.

Aberfeldy Village This is a recently-regenerated area of Tower Hamlets providing homes for sale and rent, and plenty of green space. Aberfeldy Street – the centre of the regeneration after which the new estate is named – led to the East India Docks. These docks, rather unsurprisingly, were set up to handle trade to the ‘East Indies’, that is the British colonies around India and South East Asia. Sadly I haven’t been able to find the reason for the street name.

Aberfeldie, Melbourne, Victoria This is a suburb of Melbourne, the name coming from one of its first residents, Scotsman James Robertson. He had been born in Aberfeldy, and named his new house after his home town. After his house was sold in 1888, the name became extended to represent the whole area. It is most notable for its Polish Catholic Church, which was consecrated in 1973 by the future Pope John Paul II.

Aberfeldy, Victoria Gold had been found in the remote regions of Victoria State in the second half of the 19^th Century, and in 1871 Mount Lookout was founded. Later renamed Aberfeldy, it would have 500 residents at its peak. The river running through the village was also named Aberfeldy, though the native name for it is ‘Nambruc’. After the gold rush the population dwindled away, and today there is only one permanent resident.

Next week we return to Wales, to the capital city of the ancient kingdom of Gwynedd – Aberffraw on the Isle of Anglesey. Needless to say, it’s going to be a long one.

References

The Birks of Aberfeldy, Robert Burns

The Birks of Aberfeldy Walk, Explore Pitlochry.

George Wade: Biography, Undiscovered Scotland

The Black Watch Monument, Aberfeldy, Highland Perthshire Tourism

Moness Resort: Hotel Review, Undiscovered Scotland

Fencibles Scots army sword to be auctioned, Frank Urquhart, The Scotsman, 16 October 2013

Moness Resort, Moness Group Ltd.

Aberfeldy Water Mill, David Ross, Britain Express

Aberfeldy Distillery, Dewars