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THE ENUMERATION DISTRICT OF CWMRHEIDOL, 1861-71: A COMPARATIVE STUDY.* The 1 86 1 -7 1 Enumeration District of Cwmrheidoll largely comprises the valley of the river Rheidol from a point about four miles east of Aberystwyth to the vicinity of Plynlimon, the highest mountain in Mid Wales.2 Much of it forms part of the parish of Llanbadarn Fawr. There is no village or parish bearing the name of the ED. In its low- lying parts the valley is fertile agricultural land, whereas in its upper reaches the gradients are steep and the land itself inhospitable. Today, the District, though spectacularly beautiful, is sparsely populated, with sheep farming as the main occupation. The Rheidol watercourse is short and rapid-flowing, rising high in the slopes of Plynlimon and running out to sea at Aberystwyth, where the river Ystwyth also has its outlet. Since Roman times the area has been an important source of lead ore. In later times, great quantities of lead, zinc, copper and silver were extracted, and many fortunes made and lost. The popu- lation of the ED in 1861 was 1,304, but the transcript of the census we have, records only 1,012. In this case the PRO states that, as in numerous other Welsh returns for that year, there are unfortunately missing portions of the original returns. The shortfall in this instance is around 22% and is sufficient to invalidate any full statistical com- parison between the two decades with which we are concerned. The truncated 1861 return, however, presents noteworthy features. We begin with the proportion of females to the total population as given in the transcript entries. This amounts to 51.78%, and in the next decade the figure was 51.5% These figures are not in themselves remarkable but they contrast sharply with those revealed by a study of the nearby Aberystwyth Borough censuses, which produced proport- ions of 57.31% and 56.41 respectively. At this time, Aberystwyth was a busy seaport, and probably the disparity in comparison with the Cwmrheidol figures was due to the numbers of mariners based there who may well have been absent when the census was taken. Women with mariner husbands at sea were often listed as mariners' wives', but the practice was not invariably followed by all enumer- ators, and it is unsafe to attempt to calculate the numbers of mariners *The author, Mr. E. Alwyn Benjamin, a retired Civil Servant, is the author of Penarth r841-187r­ A Glimpse of the Past, published in November 1980. He has followed up this work with a thousand-page transcript of the nineteenth century censuses for Aberystwyth and District, the MS of which is now with the National Libiary of Wales. The NLW has described this as an extraordinarily valuable work. Mr. Benjamin spent his early years in Aberystwyth but he now lives in Penarth. He is familiar with the area covered in this study. His plan is to extend the study to cover each of the other Districts detailed in the census transcripts.