The Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates at large

Einion Thomas and Nia Powell attended the Annual Spring Conference of the British Agricultural History Society held at Bangor this year between 30 March and 1 April. This proved a great opportunity to meet other researchers from England and the continent who are working on aspects of estate history.

Nia Powell had been invited to give the opening keynote lecture, and spoke on ‘Pastoral prosperity and the bankrolling of polite society in early modern Wales’.

On 27 March 2015, Einion Thomas, Dr Lowri Rees and Nia Powell attended an international round-table at the University of Dundee where representatives from Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, England and Wales met. Stephen Benham, an archivist at the National Library of Wales with special responsibility for estate records, attended with the Bangor delegation indicating the close co-operation between ISWE at Bangor and NLW at Aberystwyth.

A centre similar to ISWE is now being established to study estates in Scotland jointly by the Department of History at Dundee University and the Centre for Environmental History and Policy at the University of Stirling. This development has happened partly as a result of the establishment of ISWE at Bangor, and the centre will be launched in August 2015. It will engage in co-operation with Bangor.

The March round-table at Dundee followed the arrangements made at the Bangor round-table in November, and the main theme of discussion was ‘The Recreational Landscape’. Einion Thomas gave a research paper on, 'Respectable men? The Welsh poachers'.

On 6-7 February 2015 Dr Lowri Rees and Nia Powell attended the sixth Research and Policy Seminar organized by the Yorkshire Country House Partnership and held at York University.

As part of a panel on Wales Dr Rees presented a  paper entitled ‘Writing the History of Landed Estates and Country Houses in Wales: Myths and Realities’. She traced changes in the way in which the relationship between estate owners and their tenants have been interpreted in Wales, offering important suggestions for future developments. 

Publication date: 18 May 2015