Bwlchgwyn and the Common Land
How an open upland became part of a village
Embedded Files
Before Bwlchgwyn became a mining village, much of the landscape around it was common land. At the beginning of the nineteenth century that began to change, but the transition from open common to private property was not always straightforward.
“Fifty years ago Bwlchgwyn was a mere common.”
— R. V. Kyrke, speaking at Bwlchgwyn Board School, 1887
Looking back over approximately half a century, R. V. Kyrke remembered grouse occupying the ground on which Bwlchgwyn's school later stood. To him, the change was remarkable: what he remembered as a “barren mountain” had been transformed by its inhabitants into what he called “a habitable land.”
Wrexham Advertiser
Sat, Feb 19, 1887 ·Page 8
The enclosure of Bwlchgwyn
The enclosure of Bwlchgwyn
An important change came at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In 1809, land described as the “common called Bwlch Gwym” was divided into five parcels and offered for sale.
It represents an important moment in the changing landscape of Bwlchgwyn. Ground which had previously been understood and used as common was increasingly being divided, bounded and brought into private ownership.
But we should be careful about imagining enclosure as a single event which instantly produced the landscape we know today. The surviving evidence suggests a more complicated story.
The boundaries between common ground and private property could remain uncertain, while people continued to establish homes and plots around the edges of the common.
Making a home on the common
Making a home on the common
One surviving account gives us an unusually vivid glimpse of how settlement could take place.
Around 1820, David Price established himself on Bwlchgwyn Common. He built a small, single-room cottage and enclosed a piece of ground around it.
His actions brought him into conflict with the Kyrke family, who claimed rights over the land. Labourers were sent with instructions to pull the cottage down.
Price, however, was determined to remain.
According to the account, he sharpened an axe and warned the men that they would have to kill him before they could pull the house down over his wife and children.
Whether every detail of the confrontation happened exactly as it was later remembered is impossible to know, but the cottage survived.
A compromise appears to have been reached. Price was permitted to retain his house and the plot he had already enclosed, provided that he took no more land from the common. In return, he was required to pay one shilling a year.
Artistic depiction of David Price's stand off with the Kyrke families labourers
Unfortunately, the identity of David Price’s cottage has been lost to history.
Google Sites
Report abuse