Trefeca

Trefeca is a handful of buildings a mile from Talgarth, and for about twenty years in the middle of the eighteenth century it was one of the most consequential places in Wales.

Harris

Howell Harris was born here in 1714. In 1735, at Talgarth parish church, he had the experience that set him preaching, and he then spent two decades travelling Wales as an unordained exhorter, addressing crowds in fields and farmyards and being repeatedly refused ordination by a church that found him embarrassing.

He was not a comfortable man. His diaries, held at the National Library, run to enormous length and are relentlessly self-examining. He fell out spectacularly with Daniel Rowland, the other principal figure of the Welsh revival, and the movement split for a decade over it.

The Family

In 1752 Harris withdrew from itinerant preaching and established a community at Trefeca which he called the Family.

Around a hundred people lived there communally. They farmed, ran workshops, printed, and pooled their property. It was part monastery, part commune and part model farm, and it was one of very few experiments of its kind in eighteenth-century Britain.

Harris took a serious interest in agricultural improvement and the Family was, by contemporary accounts, unusually well run. He also raised a militia company during the Seven Years' War, which sat oddly with a good deal of what he otherwise stood for.

He died in 1773 and is buried at Talgarth church, where it started.

The college

In 1768 Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, established a college at Trefeca to train preachers, which operated for a few decades. Later a Calvinistic Methodist college occupied the site.

The buildings survive and are used as a Christian centre and retreat by the Presbyterian Church of Wales, with a museum covering Harris and the revival.

Why it matters

Welsh Methodism became the largest single religious movement in Wales and, through the chapels, the institution that taught rural Wales to read, gave it its politics, and held the language in place for three generations.

It is reasonable to say that the modern Welsh nonconformist tradition has two starting points, and one of them is a parish church in Talgarth and the other is a farmyard a mile away.

Visiting

The centre at Trefeca opens for visitors; check before travelling as it is primarily a working retreat rather than an attraction.

Talgarth is a mile away, and the church where Harris was converted and where he is buried is worth combining with it.