Portable fonts

by | posted in: Archaeology | 2

I have to admit that, before I went down this particular research wormhole, I hadn’t thought much about portable fonts. I knew about the Reformation debates about fonts and baptism, and the move away from chunky stone fonts near the church door to plain basins in full view of the congregation. But being more of a medievalist, I had assumed that ‘traditional stone font’ meant something hefty and virtually immovable.

Then I was sent photos of this (photos are © Peter Brooks)

looking for all the world like a traditional stone font but only about twelve inches high. It was found about fifty years ago at Penrhys in the Rhondda, during the building of the housing estate there. When found, it was broken in two, and the finders repaired it with cement and a metal pin. Before the estate was built, the hillside was home to a couple of small farms – but during the later Middle Ages it had been one of the holiest places in Wales. A famous carving of the Virgin and Child, believed to have arrived there by a miracle, made it a focus for pilgrimage, and the Welsh poets wrote in its praise.

Quite by coincidence, at about the same time, this popped up on Twitter – https://twitter.com/fotofacade/status/1527166580467150848

And a reference to a blog post https://church-travellers.eu/abbey-church-waltham-abbey-essex/ – scroll down for a photo of the same miniature font

And a lengthy discussion on Twitter – follow the threads from the original posting. People recalled baptisms using the Waltham miniature font and posted a photo of a completely different design which (according to family tradition) could have come from the Holy Land.

Penrhys was a grange chapel of the Cistercian monks of Llantarnam. The land should initially have been farmed by lay brothers of the order, but we know the grange had tenants by the early 14th century. Technically, I suppose, they should have gone to the parish church in Llanwynno for things like baptisms – Llanwynno is 2.75 km from Penrhys as the crow flies, but across a steep-sided valley. Cistercian chapels for tenants do seem to have had facilities for baptisms: the abbey church at Margam, for instance, has three medieval fonts, all presumably from outlying chapelries. They are all full size, and one would expect a permanent font in a grange chapel to be full size, but there could have been small portable fonts for emergency baptisms in remote farmsteads.

Somehow, though, although the miniature font was battered and worn, it did not look medieval. It has been taken to the National Museum in Cardiff and both the small finds officer and the Head of Collections and Research (History and Archaeology thought ‘maybe Victorian’. The Twitter discussion included a link to this https://churchantiques.com/product/small-vintage-gothic-bisque-china-baptismal-church-table-font/ – which as it’s china is presumably Victorian.

My first instinct was to think Catholic, or maybe High Anglican – that Victorian revival of ritualism and focus on the sacraments. However, a response to the original Twitter posting said that miniature fonts were common in Nonconformist chapels. Further enquiry suggested they are still used in the Methodist tradition. I am planning to seek out a few examples of these.

However, it is possible that the Penrhys find had no liturgical use. The team at the Baptisteria Sacra project https://bsi.dhn.utoronto.ca/main/project-information/ pointed to the difficulties of taking baptism in a miniature font. Would it not be better to have closed weatherproof containers for consecrated water, salt and oil? They also sent me these photos

– a rough earthenware replica font, 7” tall, quite elaborate in design and lavishly decorated. The base reads ‘Font in West Deeping Church Linc. Published by T I WHITE LONDON 1831’. This would not have been much use as a water container and seems to have been produced commercially as an ornament.

The Penrhys font, though, is stone and could have held water. But wherever it came from, whenever it was made, and whatever it was used for, how did it end up broken on a remote Welsh hillside?

Reeves and dunghills

by | posted in: Archaeology, Welsh History | 0

This is real hardcore lost farmsteads – this

is all that is left of a farm called Maerdy. It appears on the tithe plan as Mardy Du, and in 1840 it was being farmed along with a larger farm, Gwern y Domen. It belonged to the Plymouth estate and the tenant was an Edmund Morgan (I think he has cropped up elsewhere – was he sub-letting?). It’s on the 1900 OS map as Maerdy cottages, so it seems to have gone down in the world, and it’s possible that the outbuilding marked on the tithe plan has become a cottage. There is still something marked on the 1:25.000 OS map at ST 17007 87450 but it’s hard to locate on the ground. The track down from Gwern-y-domen Farm to the railway line doesn’t follow the line of the right of way, the woods have expanded since the aerial photo was taken … but this is my best guess.

 

 

We tried to find the well, which is a little further up the slope. The stream clearly flows from it

 

but the brambles defeated even Nell.

 

This is all a pity, as Maerdy would have been one of the most important farms in the area in the middle ages. Under Welsh law, the maer was the royal official in each commote, responsible for cultivating the king’s land and supervising the serfs (somewhat like a reeve in England). He also presided over the local court. As the Norman marcher lords took over from local Welsh rulers, they took over the organizational structure of the commotes, so the office of maer continued into the later medieval period.

But there was another maer in each commote, the maer y biswail (literally the dung-reeve) who was responsible for the lord’s cattle and could have day-to-day responsibility for farming as well. In The Welsh King and his Court, Glanville Jones pointed out that most places called maerdy were actually the homes of dung-reeves. So our farm may have been the home of a practical farm supervisor rather than a court official.

In a comment on my blog post on Parc y Fan at https://www.heritagetortoise.co.uk/2020/09/parc-y-fan/, John Owen suggested that the name might indicate the home farm for the centre of a multiple estate, possibly based on a building near the site of the Van Mansion. The various surveys of the De Clare estates mention Rudry, Hendrenny and Castell Coch as separate units, possibly manors? This he thinks may be the frozen remains of a multiple estate. Multiple estates were large land holdings organized so that they included all the necessary resources – good arable land, meadow, pasture, woodland, marsh land, rough mountain etc.

Or is there some connection with Gwern y Domen? The actual tomen is a castle mound a little to the north-east of Maerdy, with its bailey cut across by the disused railway line. Could this have been the local stronghold with Maerdy as the administrative headquarters? The problem is that we have little or no documentation and the archaeology has been messed up by industrial development and later housing.

But we do still have records of farms like Maerdy, Parc y Fan, Treboeth and the Warren to enable us to start reconstructing the old farming landscape.

Parc y Fan

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General), Welsh History | 4

Well, this is another that I must have walked past several times without realising what it was. These foundations under the brambles and bracken

must be all that’s left of Parc y Fan (OK, Park y Van in Wenglish), a substantial farm part of the Plymouth estate. The ruins are at ST 17282 86667, just to the east of the Van house and near the bottom of the footpath down from the Gwernydomen lane to the Nant Gwaunybara.

John Owen remembers ‘substantial remains’ here (see his comments under Treboeth on this blog) but there is little left now.

It was a sizeable farm – 83½ acres according to the tithe apportionment, between the Van and the Nant Gwaunybara. The same tenant also held the area to the east called Van Park, 115 acres of pasture and woodland. By the time of the first edition 6” OS map (surveyed 1875), all the land on the east side of the brook was wooded but this still left a substantial farm of over 80 acres. The buildings are still marked on the modern 1:25,000 map but there is really very little on the ground.

 

Then there’s this,

a little to the east and just above the Nant Gwaunybara – but this is clearly a field wall,

above the steep bank of the stream, and this

is probably the field angle marked on the early OS. The layout of the buildings at Parc y Fan changes from map to map, and it isn’t clear which was the farmhouse and which the outbuildings. Also there’s a well somewhere above the farmhouse. We need another look when the vegetation has died down.

The name of the farm  might lead us to speculate that this was where the park keeper for the Van park lived. The Lewis family emparked a huge area east of the house, probably in the sixteenth century (Rice Merrick described a park there in 1578).  The present house of the Van was built in the 1580s. The family then moved to St Fagans and leased the Van to tenants. The park went out of use, and by the time of the tithe plan it was mostly farm land, part of the Van, Gwern y Domen, Maerdy (Mardy Du on the tithe plan) and Park y Van. The park straddled the parish boundary. West of the Nant Gwernydomen was in the Van hamlet of Bedwas (a Monmouthshire parish but with hamlets in Glamorgan – the parish boundaries in this area a very idiosyncratic). East of the stream was in the parish of Rudry. (You get some idea of the problems of surveying these farms by the fact that the road from Caerphilly to Rudry, which is the southern boundary of the farm, doesn’t line up between the two maps.) John Owen has looked at the C18 estate maps in the Plymouth collection in the Glamorgan Archives. They show the park extending south of the present Caerphilly-Rudry road, including the Warren and Ty’n-y-parc (see https://www.heritagetortoise.co.uk/2020/08/the-warren/ and https://www.heritagetortoise.co.uk/2020/05/more-deserted-farmsteads/). So did the road run through the park – or does the road post-date the park? We need to get back to the estate surveys when the record office is open.

Maerdy might be the next one to explore – it was being farmed with Gwernydomen on the tithe apportionment. It’s  marked as Maerdy Cottages on the old OS maps but there doesn’t seem to be a house there now. Alas, Caerphilly is currently in lockdown because the number of Covid-19 cases there is on the increase, so Nell and I will have to take to walking somewhere else. Time for a look at the Llandaff-Penrhys pilgrimage route, maybe?

The Warren

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General), Welsh History | 0

As I expected, there was very little to see on the site of the Warren farm. It’s on the tithe plan but as part of Treboeth, the farm to the east (https://www.heritagetortoise.co.uk/2020/08/tre-boeth-the-warm-town/). Here’s a sketch plan based on the tithe plan on places.library.wales (field numbers refer to the tithe apportionment – click through to that from the map on the web site)

and the detail of the actual farmstead

By the time of the first 6” Ordnance Survey it had vanished under the forest.

Or had it?

Part of the difficulty is that the track marked on the modern OS running past it isn’t really there on the ground. You really need the eye of faith to identify this as a track!

But persevere and just to the north of the track you spot this

 

the south-west angle of the farmyard (no. 1 on the plan).

And you can just see the line of the wall going north (2 on the plan)

and the return (3 on the plan).

The eastern wall of the farmyard is quite clear (4 on the plan)

the north-east corner (5 on the plan)

and the return (6 on the plan).

The farmhouse is just heaps of tumbled stone (the shaded area on the plan).

 

 

 

Having walked all round it several times, I’m pretty convinced that this is the site of the farm. The problem is that it is at about ST 16229 85809, 40-50 m east of where the farm is marked on the tithe plan. The 1841 plan puts the farm virtually on the bank of a little stream running north out of the woods. The remains I have found are some way to the east.

However – looking at the 6” OS map (this is a sketch based on it)

The pin marker shows the eastern end of the farmstead according to the tithe plan overlay (I’m working between the tithe plan and 2nd edition OS on places.library.wales and the 2nd edition OS and modern OS on https://historicplacenames.rcahmw.gov.uk/ – there doesn’t seem to be a single site that does the lot, and none of them uses the 1:25,000 OS Leisure map, which is the really useful one). But on the OS map there is a small square building a little to the east (outlined in red on the sketch plan).  Is this the real location of the Warren – and is the little square building all that was left of it, used as some sort of shelter, perhaps, for workmen in the plantation?

The name Warren is interesting. Warrens were preserves for rabbits, at a time when rabbits were useful but very fragile little creatures and the perquisites of lords and gentry. They came from southern Europe and took a long time to adapt to the colder and wetter climate of England and Wales. Special raised burrows called pillow mounds were built for them, and they were cared for by warreners. Our farm could have started as the warrener’s home.

There is no documentary evidence for a warren on Caerphilly Mountain. However, the big field to the west of the Warren farm (519 on the tithe plan) is actually called the Warren, and the field in which the farmstead sits is called Warren Fawr. The fields north-west of Warren farm are part of Ty’n-y-cae and are all called Cae pen y warren on the tithe apportionment. This really does look indicative.

What we can’t tell, in the absence of any documentation, is how old the warren was and who it belonged to. If it was medieval, it belonged to Caerphilly Castle. However, warrens were still being constructed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so it could have belonged to the Lewis family of the Van, the big house across the valley, before they moved to St Fagans.

John Owen’s comments on the post on Treboeth are very illuminating. Treboeth was there in the later middle ages, and wood from there went to repair a bridge in Caerphilly Castle in 1428. If the Warren really was a warrener’s house, these two little ruins, hidden under the trees, are some of our earliest evidence for the farming landscape east of Caerphilly.

Tre-boeth – the ‘warm town’?

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General) | 7

This is another little farmstead that I must have walked past at least a dozen times without realising it was there. It’s at the north-east side of the Wern-ddu Claypits, just above the site of the old brickworks, at about ST 16684 85984.

To be fair to myself, what you can see from the lane

isn’t the farm house but a little outbuilding – henhouse? pigsty?

(nice bit of creamy mortar)

Once you know it’s there, you can just make out the farmhouse from the lane

 

and this fenced-off bit

must be the well

(still marked on the modern OS map).

On the old OS maps it’s Tre-boeth, the warm township, but on the tithe plan it’s Treboth. The name might suggest early industrial activity. There’s plenty of evidence for early coal mining, and before that there would have been charcoal burning for the early iron industry. The farmhouse looks small, and there is only the one outbuilding, but on the tithe apportionment it’s a substantial farm of 133 acres, part of the Clive estate and tenanted by a Thomas Evans. Most of the land is to the north and west: to the south was wooded in 1841. By the first 6”OS map (1875) the whole of the former farm was wooded. Plantation for pit props? The farm is still marked but must by that date have been a smallholding for a worker in the clay pits or the brickworks, or possibly in the woods. It’s still there on the 1915 revision but by the 1938-47 revision it has disappeared.

Part of the size of the farm on the tithe apportionment seems to be that it has swallowed up another farm. On the tithe apportionment it’s described as ‘Treboth and Warren’. ‘Warren’ is actually another farmstead to the west, in what is now the depths of Wern-ddu woods, marked on the tithe plan but not on any of the OS maps. There may be nothing now on the ground but I feel I should have a look.

Watch this space. (It may just be a space.)

Not the Head of the Pass

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General), Welsh History | 0

The woods between Rudry and Parc Cefn-onn are about the limit for my weekly long walk – about 12-13 miles with quite a bit of Up! But there is still plenty to have a look at.

This little ruined farmstead at ST 19223 85750

took a surprising amount of finding. Part of the problem was the name. On the old OS maps it’s Pen-y-bwlch, Head of the Pass – but it’s actually well down in the valley. The current OS marks a track to it – a double-pecked-line track, looking on the map like a forest road, with a bridleway along it and crossing the footpath and the little stream to head over the fields to Ty’n-y-graig.

But there is no road through the woods. Just the footpath south from Coedcae Garw along the edge of Coed Coesau-whips. The old maps put it east of the footpath but the path now goes between the house (to the west)

and what remains of the outbuildings.

(Someone has made a firepit with a lot of the outbuilding stone.)

Once we found it, though, after a couple of false starts, it was worth the effort.

(here’s Nell on the house wall.)

On the tithe plan it’s a farm of just over 20 acres, with a couple of fields along the lane to the north and the rest to the south and east. Coed Coesau-whips on the tithe plan is smaller but still shown as mainly conifers – but John Owen’s idea that the name suggests charcoal production for the iron industry would mean an earlier wood of something like beech and oak. I do wonder whether these little farms like Coedcae Garw, Cwm and Pen-y-bwlch were carved out of the original wood. Then when timber became a valuable commercial commodity for pit props and the plantation was extended, the farms were reabsorbed.

There would also have been access problems. On the tithe plan the access is down the lane past Coedcae Garw,

across the ford

and up a narrow hollow way –

this must have been possible only for a single horse, no room for even a small wheeled vehicle. By 1900 there was a track through the woods, but by that date most of the farmland had been lost to forest. The house is still marked by name but can only have been a cottage for something like a forest worker.

Access may have been what put an end to a lot of these little farms – once farming moved from using horses to mechanical vehicles, anywhere far off the road would have great difficulty in keeping going.

Coedcae and the Cwm

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General), Welsh History | 0

Having found the ruins of Coedcae Garw thanks to @mikekohnstamm (https://www.heritagetortoise.co.uk/2020/07/coedcae-garw/) I’ve reverse engineered the process and gone back to looking for farms and smallholdings which are on the tithe plans and the old OS but not on the modern map. There were two just along the lane from Coedcae Garw. Ty’r-ywen is at grid ref. ST 20152 86428 and Cwm is at ST 19911 86265.

Ty’r-ywen on the tithe map was a cottage and garden of 1 rood 20 perches, belonging to the Clive estate and tenanted by a Thomas Thomas. It was too small to have any value for tithe. There are 4 roods to an acre and 40 perches to a rood, so Thomas’s garden was about 1,500 square metres, about the size of 3 tennis courts. Enough to grow veg for a family and keep a pig and a few chickens but not enough to live on. The men of the family probably worked in the nerby iron works or on bigger farms and the women and young children looked after the homestead. You find a similar pattern all along the edge of the industrial area – my father-in-law was brought up on a similar smallholding in the Sirhowy valley, and my own house originally stood in a garden nearly as big as Ty’r-ywen’s.

Ty’r-ywen is named on the 1915/22 6” OS map (accessible on the wonderful maps.nls.uk site).  A building is marked on the 1948-1953 map but without a name. All that is there now is this

the concrete bases for prefab panels. It looks very much as though the cottage was deserted and rebuilt as some sort of farm building, then that too became derelict.

The other lost smallholding is Cwm. It’s complicated because there are actually two farms called Cwm in that little valley. One is just across the lane from Ty’r-ywen and is now quite a big horse-riding establishment. The other is a little way  up stream, just off the Ridgeway Path and just before the path crosses the stream and goes up into the trees. On the tithe plan it’s a bit complicated. The house, garden and croft, a little over 2acres, belong to the Morgan estate and are tenanted by a John Morgan. But the surrounding fields, Waun and Cae Fry, are called ‘Cwm Land’, also part of the Morgan estate and tenanted by Spencer Thomas. The fields on the other side of the stream,  called Cwm mawr and Cwm Ceffyl, belong to the bigger Cwm farm, part of the Clive estate and tenanted by  Isaac Price.

This must be the house

 

 

 

just a bit of tumbled stone under the brambles. Another candidate for a winter visit, when the undergrowth has died down a bit.

The path south into the woods was stiled and waymarked so we gave it a go. It is steep, and damp in places, but a good clear route cutting across the forest roads to the top of the next ridge. We looked at this

between the forest edge and the trig point but there’s nothing on the OS or tithe plans so we concluded it was tumbled stone from the field wall.

Sometimes a heap of stone is just a heap of stone.

But the views from the trig point are splendid.

Coedcae Garw

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General), Welsh History | 3

I’m still finding ruined farmsteads north of Cardiff. The number surprises me. We’re used to finding little lost farms in the upland forests – they were no longer viable in the changing economy of the later 20th century and many were swallowed up by the Forestry Commission in the great drive to plant conifers after World War 2. On the fringes of Cardiff, though, you would have thought they could have kept going with market gardening, chickens and dairying – but it was a hard life, and jobs in light industry must have been attractive.

This one

was first spotted by @mikekohnstamm. It’s on the slopes above Lisvane but in the parish of Rudry, where Coed Cefn-onn meets Coed Coesau-whips. On the Tithe Map it’s Coedcae Garw, a smallholding of 11 acres, part of the Tredegar estate and occupied in 1840 by Edward Rowlands. Most of its land is to the south-west, and Edward Rowlands was also farming land down the lane part of the Clive estate. It’s still marked on the 1953 6” map but it may have been deserted by then.

Part of the farm house seems to have been rebuilt in brick, probably in the late 19th or early 20th centuries,

but the old pigsties are still stone.

My grandparents kept pigs on their farm at Cefn Llwyd, a couple of miles to the east. They always took the sows to the boar at the Maen-llwyd, and there was one sow who could find her own way there when she felt like it. I wonder whether the sows at Coedcae Garw went to the same boar.

The name Coed Coesau-whips is interesting. John Owen of Caerphilly suggests it could indicate that the older woods were coppiced to provide charcoal for the iron industry. There was a lead shaft just above Coedcae Garw (still visible on the Rhymney Valley Ridgeway) and the Rudry iron mine is a little further down the Nant y Cwm.

There are also a couple more farms that don’t seem to be on the modern map – Cwm and Ty’rywen. Next week, perhaps.

Cefncarnau-fawr – then and now

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General), Welsh History | 0

I’ve been trying to tie up the plan in the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments in Wales’ inventory with what’s on old maps on https://places.library.wales/ and https://maps.nls.uk/os/ (another amazing resource and although it’s the National Library of Scotland it covers the whole of Britain) with what is there now – without much success, but the nettles and brambles are really a bit high for serious surveying. I’ve made a rough sketch from the RCAHMW plan and reorientated it so north is at the top.

This is clearly the kitchen (2 on the plan)

with the big fireplace and bread oven

but this looks too small for their plan of the cowshed (3 on the plan)

and I couldn’t get anywhere near the older part of the house.

This is how the farm appears on the tithe plan in 1840, based on the tithe plan on https://places.library.wales/ .

The darker hatching seems to be accommodation, lighter hatching is presumably outbuildings. No barn, nothing across the lane – and what is that little building NW of the farm house?

The first edition OS is about 1875 and is on the NLS site.

This doesn’t differentiate between accommodation and outbuildings. The little building NW of the farmhouse has gone but there is something just across the lane N of the farmyard and the first of the buildings that are still there on the lane. The present farmer thinks this started as a cowshed – it has the central drainage channel and racks for the cows to be fed while they are milked – though the buildings may subsequently have been reworked for horses. There are some differences in the farmyard buildings but the really interesting thing is that the well is marked near the lane and just east of the farm, in the small enclosure which now lies between the farm house and the ruined barn.

The 2nd edition OS is surveyed 1898 and this is the map on the NLW site.

Quite a lot of changes. The cottage (or whatever it is) above the lane has gone and the cowshed/stable range above the lane is all there. A benchmark on one of the buildings – wonder if it’s still there. The buildings on the E of the farmyard have gone, to be replaced by the big barn whose ruins are still prominent.

The 3rd edition OS is on the NLS site and resurveyed 1915. No real change – one wonders if they really resurveyed it.

There are sale particulars in the Glamorgan Archive. We need a visit once the lockdown has eased sufficiently – and another site visit in the winter, when the brambles and nettles have died down.

 

Postscript: here’s the bench mark, below the door of the middle stable

 

Deserted cottages

by | posted in: Archaeology, Heritage (General), Welsh History | 0

I thought I had done all I could with the lost farming landscapes north of Cardiff, but more bits keep turning up. After I’d been to Deri-duon last week, I was trying to locate some sites on the track past Transh yr Hebog and I noticed two cottages alongside the Heol Hir. Both were there on the tithe plan; the lower one was on the early OS map. The one further up the lane wasn’t on the early OS map but there seemed to be something on the modern map.

I had another look at the sites along Transh yr Hebog. Is this just a retaining wall at about ST 17596 85066

 

just below the air shaft, or is it something more? There’s something marked on the early OS map (but no identification) and a coal tip just down slope.

The possible adit is a bit further down at about ST 17588 84977, and the second structure is at about ST 17655 84926. There’s something marked on the early OS map but nothing on the tithe plan and no identification.

Along to the two cottage sites. The lower one is at ST 17263 84542, where the path above the golf course meets the Heol Hir.

It’s virtually invisible – just a little bit of masonry under the brambles.

In the tithe apportionment it’s described as a cottage and garden, belonging to the Marquis of Bute and tenanted by a Thomas Thomas.

The upper one is at ST 17293 84673, on the footpath from Transh yr Hebog. A little bit more to see: just visible from the lane,

looks like a 2-up, 2-down house with some sort of animal shelter adjoining.

On the tithe apportionment it’s the homestead of quite a substantial farm: 40 a., though mostly pasture, belonging to the Hon. Robert Henry Clive and tenanted by a James Moses.  By the time of the OS map, the whole area was wooded.

The Heol Hir is a classic hollow way.

The hollowing must be old: there’s a section of retaining wall half way up.

I really need to revisit the cottage sites in winter when the brambles and nettles have died down.