The Welsh Language in Powys

Powys contains the sharpest language gradient in Wales. In one corner of the county Welsh is the ordinary language of a town of eight thousand people. In another it has been effectively absent for two hundred years.

Both are Powys. Neither is the exception.

Radnorshire

Old Radnorshire is the clearest case in Wales of a county that lost the language early and almost entirely. By the 1891 census, the first to ask, the proportion of Welsh speakers in most Radnorshire parishes was already in single figures.

Several things did it, and no single one is sufficient on its own.

Geography. Radnor Forest sits in the middle and the settlement goes round the edges, all of which face east. The trade, the markets, the roads and the intermarriage all ran into Herefordshire and Shropshire.

The March. Radnorshire was Marcher country with planted boroughs holding English burgesses from the thirteenth century, and the lordships were held by English families whose administration ran in English and Latin.

Nonconformity, oddly. Elsewhere the chapel preserved Welsh; in eastern Radnorshire the dissenting congregations were largely English-speaking from early on, so the institution that held the language in Montgomeryshire did the opposite here.

And the gentry. Landowners anglicised early in this part of Wales, and in a tenanted rural society what the estate speaks matters a good deal.

The north

Montgomeryshire held on far longer, and the Tanat, Vyrnwy and Banw valleys held on longest. This is Bible country in the literal sense: William Morgan translated the scriptures at Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, published in 1588, and the Welsh-language chapel culture that followed was denser here than almost anywhere.

The eastern lowland around Welshpool and Montgomery shifted to English much earlier, on the Radnorshire pattern. Within Montgomeryshire the language line ran roughly north to south and moved steadily west across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The south-west

Ystradgynlais and the upper Swansea Valley are the county's strongest Welsh-speaking area, and the reason is industry rather than isolation.

The anthracite coalfield drew its labour from Welsh-speaking country — Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion, the Brecknockshire uplands — rather than from England. The chapels were Welsh, the unions operated in Welsh, and three generations of families were educated in the language. The result is that the most industrialised part of Powys is also its most Welsh.

That surprises people, including a good many in Powys, because it inverts the usual assumption that Welsh survives where the roads are worst.

Epynt

One event moved the line measurably. In 1940 the War Office cleared Mynydd Epynt of its farms and its people. That was a Welsh-speaking community, and its dispersal shifted the western edge of Welsh-speaking Breconshire several miles in a single season.

It is one of very few cases anywhere where a language boundary can be dated to a year and attributed to an administrative decision.

Schools

The Welsh Not — a token passed to a child heard speaking Welsh, with punishment falling on whoever held it at the end of the day — was used in some Welsh schools in the nineteenth century. It is often described as an official government policy imposed on Wales.

The 1847 education report, remembered as Brad y Llyfrau Gleision, the treachery of the blue books, blamed Welsh and nonconformity for what it judged the moral condition of the country, and its effect on Welsh self-confidence was considerable and long-lasting.

Now

Across Powys as a whole, around a sixth of the population reports speaking Welsh, but the county average is close to meaningless given the spread. Welsh-medium and bilingual schools operate across the county, and the 2011 Measure gives the language official status.

What to look for

Place names everywhere, including in Radnorshire where nothing else survived. Chapel names. Gravestones, which often switch language between generations of the same family and are among the best evidence available for exactly when a parish shifted.