The Trades That Held a Parish Together

Take the census enumerator's book for a Powys parish in 1881 and read down the occupations. Farmers and agricultural labourers, obviously, and servants. But also: blacksmith, wheelwright, saddler, shoemaker, tailor, miller, carpenter, mason, thatcher, and a woman described as a dressmaker in nearly every hamlet.

A rural parish was very close to self-sufficient in manufacture, and it had to be, because everything needed to be made or mended locally by someone who could be reached on foot.

The blacksmith

The essential one. A smith shod horses, made and repaired every iron implement on every farm within reach, put tyres on cart wheels, and fixed anything broken.

Smithies are usually identifiable: a stone building at a road junction or beside a farm entrance, wide-doored, often with a horseshoe-shaped door head or a shoeing area outside. Many are garages now, which is a direct succession — the man who mended the horse's shoe mended the tractor.

The wheelwright

Frequently working alongside the smith, because a cart wheel is a collaboration. The wheelwright made the wooden wheel — hub, spokes, felloes — and the smith made the iron tyre, heated it, dropped it on and quenched it so it shrank tight.

The circular stone or iron tyring platform survives at some sites and is easy to miss: a flat disc with a hole in the middle.

The mill

Every parish with a stream had at least one corn mill, and mid Wales had fulling mills as well for finishing woollen cloth. The Welsh for a fulling mill is pandy, and the word survives in a dozen Powys place names.

Mill buildings are common survivals. Look for a leat — a level channel taken off the stream upstream and running along the contour — and a wheelpit, and a weir. Most are houses now. Bacheldre near Churchstoke still grinds.

Leather and cloth

Saddlers, harness makers, cobblers, tanners. A working farm ran on leather as much as on iron, and horse harness needed constant repair.

Tailors and dressmakers appear in almost every parish. Ready-made clothing was a late nineteenth-century arrival and its spread is traceable in the census returns as those occupations thin out.

Quieter trades

Coopers for barrels and dairy vessels. Basket makers using withies from riverside beds. Clog makers, which was a substantial rural trade in Wales — alder wood was cut and roughly shaped in the woods themselves, and the soles were stacked to season in the open.

Lime burners, quarrymen and hedgers. Drovers, until the railways.

What ended it

Not one thing.

The railways brought cheap manufactured goods from Birmingham and Sheffield that undercut anything a local craftsman could make. Ready-made boots and clothing arrived. The motor car and then the tractor removed the horse, and with the horse went the smith, the saddler, the wheelwright and a great deal else in one movement.

Roller milling in large port mills finished the country corn mills. Rural depopulation removed the customers.

By 1950 most Powys parishes had lost the lot, within about two generations.

Why it matters

Because it explains a category of building that is everywhere and unremarked: the wide-doored shed at the crossroads, the house with a wheelpit in the garden, the outbuilding with a stone floor and no obvious purpose.

It also explains a category of surname, and a great many field and house names.

Where to look

The census returns, 1841 to 1911, parish by parish. They are the single best source and they are indexed and searchable.

Trade directories — Slater's, Kelly's, Worrall's — list the tradesmen of every Welsh town and village by name and trade, decade by decade, and they are free through the National Library of Wales.

And St Fagans, which exists because Iorwerth Peate, born at Llanbrynmair in 1901, grew up among exactly these trades and understood before almost anyone else that they were about to disappear.