Welsh Journals

NANTGWYLLT Ruth Bidgood Part 1 FOREWORD In Crwydro Sir Faesyfed1 Ffransis Payne writes that though by the final years of the 19th century the family of Lewis Lloyd of 6 Nantgwyllt in Llansantffraed Cwmteuddwr was English-speak- ing, its forebears were, until about 1830, like the rest of the people of their valley, 'Cymry Cymraeg'. Some of their neighbours would have been monoglot Welsh. Nantgwyllt no doubt offered a welcome to the 'bardd gwlad' (country poet) and the harper. One of the early Powells had an elegy composed for him by Lewis Dwnn. This article is about Nantgwyllt's days as a Welsh gentry-house. The characters in such a story are rarely so obliging as to die precisely in the last year of a given century, so our account spills over into the early decades of the 19th century. It was probably a transition period; in 1806 we find one Nantgwyllt widow anglicising the name of her then home from Coedymynach to Monk Grove. On the other hand, a grand- daughter of hers who went to live in North Breconshire was wont to pray in public in a Welsh chapel, so presumably in Welsh! Nothing can be taken for granted. INTRODUCTION The vanished house of Nantgwyllt, in the Radnorshire hill-parish of Cwmteuddwr, has often been inaccurately remembered. One hears it referred to as 'Shelley's house'; indeed the poet and his first wife Harriet did stay there briefly in 1812, and Shelley was much enam- oured of the place and its wild, romantic surroundings. He did not succeed in securing a lease of it, though for a short time he tried hard.2 Herbert Vaughan wrote3 that Shelley left a memento of himself at Nantgwyllt, his name and a date cut on a window-pane with a diamond ring. The small pane was carefully removed by Miss Gertrude Lewis Lloyd, who kept it in her room at Llwynmadog, the North Breconshire home of her great friend Miss Clara Thomas. After Gertrude's death it was found to have disappeared. The theory that Nangtwyllt was the