Welsh Journals

FISHING IN TROUBLED WATERS THE PURCHASE OF THE LLANGOED ESTATE INTRODUCTION The acquisition of even the smallest piece of landed property can be fraught with potential pitfalls, as a number of modern British householders can testify. However, perhaps few can claim to have been as unlucky as John Macnamara in his struggle to buy the Llangoed estate, in south-eastern Breconshire. This paper is an account of that purchase and the long legal battle to which it led. THE LLANGOED ESTATE Our story begins at the start of the 1790s, a time that found one Sir Edward Williams master of an estate of some 54,000 acres, extending a length of 27 miles. Its centre was the Stuart mansion of Llangoed Castle, in the parish of Llyswen, on the banks of the river Wye. To the east the estate stretched along the Wye Valley through Pipton, Aberllynfi and Glasbury, right the way to the parish of Hay. In the northwest it reached up into the Epynt Hills via the parishes of Crickadarn and Gwenddwr, whilst to the south it passed through Velindre and Llanelieu up to the high valleys of Grwyne Fawr and Grwyne Fechan in the Black Mountains. It further took in parts of Llanstephan (Radnorshire), Cathedine and Llandefalle (Figure 1). Sir Edward's family had possessed these lands for nearly two hundred years, his ancestor Sir David Williams (the famous Elizabethan judge) having bought them in 1600.' Originally, the Williams family had made their home at another mansion on their estate, Gwernyfed, near Velindre, but they had later moved to Llangoed. As our story opens, the gross annual rental amounted to around £ 2,900. Whilst such comparisons are necessarily very crude, this roughly equates to over £ 180,000 in today's money.2 On the face of it Sir Edward and his wife Lady Williams were not doing at all badly. They were most certainly far above the level of a contemporary agricultural labourer, who might expect to earn a shilling a day. Indeed, at this time, a Welsh gentlemen with an estate worth over £ 2,000 per annum had one that could reasonably be considered as "large. However, trouble was brewing. For all his married life Sir Edward had been in debt and, by the last decade of the eighteenth century, the burden was evidently pressing. In particular, there were two long- standing mortgages: one for a principal sum of £ 13,000 due to the Sun Fire Office in London and another for £ 10,9154 due to Sir Edward's near neighbour, Walter Wilkins of Maesllwch, a mansion a little to the east over the river Wye in Glasbury. Both loans carried interest at 5%, meaning around 40% of Sir Edward's income was consumed in finance costs alone, with little hope of repaying the capital.