Llanbrynmair

Llanbrynmair is not really a village. It is a parish of scattered farms across high wet ground at the head of the Dyfi, with a church, a chapel and a handful of buildings where the roads cross.

It produced, in the space of about a century and a half, an encyclopaedist, the founder of the Welsh national folk museum, and one of the most consequential radical ministers in Welsh history. It also emptied.

The chapel

Hen Gapel, the old chapel, is the centre of the parish in every sense that matters. Independent, dating in its congregation to the seventeenth century, and for generations the largest building and the principal institution for miles.

That is the pattern across upland Montgomeryshire: the parish church is medieval and often awkwardly sited, while the chapel is where the community actually met, argued, sang and learned to read.

Samuel Roberts

S.R., as he was universally known, was minister here from 1834 and one of the most prolific radical journalists in Welsh. He campaigned against the tithe, against landlordism, against war and against slavery, through the periodical Y Cronicl which he edited from this parish for decades.

He also fell out comprehensively with his landlord and with much of the local establishment, and in 1857 he led a body of emigrants to Tennessee to found a Welsh colony at Brynffynnon.

It failed. The land title was defective, the American Civil War broke out across it, and Roberts returned to Wales in 1867 having lost a great deal of money and, for a period, a good deal of his reputation. He is buried in the parish.

The emigration

Roberts's Tennessee scheme was the dramatic version of something happening quietly across the whole parish.

Llanbrynmair sent people to America in numbers from the 1790s onward, principally to Ohio and later to Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Entire families went. The chapel held farewell services. Letters came back and were read aloud and circulated, and the letters themselves are one of the better sources for what conditions here were actually like.

The causes were the ordinary ones stacked together: enclosure of the commons, tenancy without security, the tithe, agricultural depression, and land in America that could be owned outright.

The parish population fell steeply through the nineteenth century and never recovered. The ruins in the ffridd above the farms are the physical record of it.

Two more

Abraham Rees, born in the parish in 1743, compiled The Cyclopædia, a forty-five-volume encyclopaedia published between 1802 and 1820 and one of the major reference works of its age.

Iorwerth Peate, born here in 1901, founded the Welsh Folk Museum at St Fagans, which opened in 1948 and changed how Wales collects and presents its own ordinary material culture. He grew up among exactly the buildings and crafts he later set out to preserve.

Now

Quiet, agricultural, on the A470 between Newtown and Machynlleth with the traffic passing through. Glyndŵr's Way crosses the parish.