Welsh Journals

NANTEOS A LANDED ESTATE IN DECLINE 1800-1930 "In squandering wealth was his peculiar art Nothing went unrewarded but desert. Beggar'd by fools, whom still he found too late He had his jest, and they had his estate." John Milton Absolom and Achitophel. The origin of the rise to local eminence of the Powell family lay in the successful legal career of Sir Thomas Powell of Llechwedd-dyrus (1631-1704) who became a King's Bench judge and Baron of the Exchequer during the reign of James II. Sir Thomas's son, William, married Avarina, daughter of Cornelius le Brun and his wife Ann, co- heiress of John Jones of Nanteos.1 Their son Thomas, who served as Member of Parliament both for the Borough and the County, had married Mary, daughter of Sir John Frederick, Lord Mayor of London. Although she brought her husband a substantial dowry, part of which was expended in the construction of the present mansion, Mary was unable to provide Thomas with an heir to the Nanteos estate, and upon his death in 1752 the property devolved upon his only surviving brother, the scholarly Dr. William Powell, LL.D.' Upon his wife Elizabeth, daughter of Athelstan Owen of Rhiwsaeson in Montgomery- shire, the doctor sired a son, Thomas, who was eventually to become involved in the founding of the Welsh Girls' School at Ashford in Middlesex. Thomas died in 1797, leaving his wife Eleanor, his heir William (b. 1788), a younger son, Richard, and two daughters, together with relatively modest contract debts of £ 12,000. The broad, if infertile, acres to which William Powell was heir, were widely dispersed throughout north Cardiganshire. While the bulk of the property was concentrated in the parish of Llanfihangel-y- Creuddyn between the Ystwyth and Rheidol rivers, with outlying farms in the mountainous country between Devil's Bridge and Pont- erwyd, the family also held land bordering upon Cors Tregaron, togeth- er with the old Strata Florida Abbey estate in the uplands of Caron. Apart from six great mountain sheepwalks in the parish of Llanddewi Abergwesyn which represented the most easterly limit of Nanteos's 30,000 acres, and isolated holdings in Llanddewibrefi and Llangybi, the remainder of the estate was in Lampeter Rural parish to the south- east of Cribyn. A series of family settlements had ensured that a life tenant of the estate, while enjoying the right to draw income from, and raise mortgages upon them, was precluded from disposing of the above properties during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, inheritances and prudent purchases in the preceding century, had led to the accumulation of a considerable