Some Welsh history, especially the Epynt clearances

 I slept badly last night - Alfie came in at 1 a.m. to be let out and that was me for several hours.  I've had to kip on the sofa at lunchtime and have been re-watching The Last Kingdom (how Keith and I enjoyed that series) on Netflix, and idly looking up various Welsh history leads at the National Library of Wales.

Here's what I bought at the Garden Centre.  I need to clean out a couple of planters and put fresh compost in the top and get these bulbs in. 

I kept away from plastic baubles (pretty though they were) and the owl, the mouse and the little Rosie decoration are a delight.

Last night's perusals on line bring you an extract from an old Welsh antiquarian journal dated August 10th 1804:  It was about the baptising of the g.g. grand-daughter (Ann Thomas), whose g.g. granny was Elizabeth Thomas, of Bettws, who was aged 99 years.  She was blind in one eye but could still knit, spin and sew without glasses, and she often walked 5 - 8 miles daily.  Her living children numbered 7, and she had 30 grandsons and nearly 100 g. grandsons . . .  Gosh, that certainly overwhelmed the gene pool in Bettws (near Newport) a bit!

I was reading about Conjuror Harries of Cwrt-y-Cadno, about whom I wrote a good few years ago after the library book about the Epynt clearances, mentioned him again in the finding of a murderer after a woman's body - that of Peggy Fach of Ffrydiau was found in a bog.  Her lover Jack (of Troed-rhiw-derwyddon) had killed her and buried her body there. Apparently Harries was instrumental in the finding of this body too, so solving yet another murder mystery.  Few local people would pass Cymdyfnant,  where the bog was, after dark.  In Herbert Hughes' book "An Uprooted Community - a History of Epynt" also mentions a bird photographer who would go there to take photos of the Ravens in the area.

The Epynt book is a very interesting read but you cannot help but feel distressed still for the people who lost the farms and smallholdings which had been their homes for generations, in some cases since Elizabethan times.  As at Tyneham village (near Swanage) in Dorset, the MoD laid claim to the land (36,000 acres) as an Army training area and their representative visited every farm, giving a date for the evictions.  No consideration was given that it might had been right in the middle of lambing, and the same price was paid for good acreage as for neglected sour rushy hill grazing, which upset people too, being so unfair.  

Slightly better grazing in this photo.

It was a hard life up there - you have seen some of the photos I've used in my blog since we've moved here.  It is what is known as marginal land - somewhere only just possible to scrape a living.  Sheep are about the only livestock that paid, and only the older unimproved types of cereal - red wheat and grey oats - could cope with the poor acidic soil and the rainfall. Back in those times there were no tight elastic bands to put around the ram lambs' testicles until they atrophied - indeed, one man claimed to have castrated thousands of 4 - 6 week old lambs using his TEETH!!  They would even make a ewe's milk cheese, thus utilising another aspect of sheep keeping.  It would be mixed one gallon of ewes' milk to a (separated - cream for butter) single cow's milking and would be sold at market after 6 mths or so of it curing.  Butter was made weekly and baskets of eggs also taken to the mart.  Any left over butter would be salted and put in a crock and taken back in during winter months when a premium price could be achieved.  Obviously in the summer there would be a glut of butter as all the cows had calved close together.  

Peat was used for burning, and there were three types (qualities) of peat, and a peat fire was never allowed to go out. One old dear was known for burning "cled" -  "the firm stuff" - in other words, cow pats she had dried and saved!  The author reports that once some old swords had been found in the depths of a peat bog.  Iron Age perhaps.  Coal had to be bought and was burnt with the peat.  Bargoed coal (where my grandfather was a miner) was the favourite. The fine coal would be made into "pele" by mixing it with local clay to make it burn longer.  In some farms the fireplace was on the actual floor and burned well there.  In areas where there were oak trees, these would have the bark stripped from them before felling and the bark transferred to the tannery in old canvases.

Food was probably fairly repetitive - there were three types of gruel ("sucan") which was eaten at breakfast.  One was water mixed with inferior flour, which then stood for a week to a fortnight to settle, then mixed and a portion put into a pan over the fire and drank as if it were hot milk.  The second was boiled and stirred until it thickened, like jelly and a portion of this eaten with milk. The third type was made like a thick porridge and poured into basins.  Pancakes were made with buttermilk and this was far nicer than using milk.  Bread, butter and cheese were eaten for tea.

Cawl - soup - was the lunchtime staple of the daily diet and made with scraps of beef, and root vegetables.  A cow would be killed in the autumn - a community barren cow of some 4 or 5 years old - would be killed, bled and then suspended from a beam and sawn up into portions.  Entrails weren't used and liver was the prerequisite of the man who had butchered it.  The rumen (stomach) was washed, covered in hot lime for a few days and then washed again and the inside peeled off and the outside (tripe) put in salt water until clean and then cooked.  Any fat made tallow for candle-making and the butcher would have the skin. The lower legs were boiled down to produce an oil used to treat stiffness.

I will end with quoting from the book.  The family of one farmstead were moving out at the end of June - shelling was to commence on 1st July

 "An old lady of 82 sat on an old chair she had dragged out to the furthest end of the yard, and was sitting there, motionless, gazing towards the mountain with tears streaming down her cheeks.  She had been born there, and her father and grandfather before her.  She is leaving today and she is distilling into these last few minutes one last enriching view of the ancient mountain or recalling her lifespan in the old cottage.  I don't know, I could only see the tears of her anguish."  This was written by Iowerth C Peate, who created St Fagans, the Welsh Folk Museum in Cardiff.