Welsh Journals

THE DECAYED AND DECAYING INDUSTRIES OF POWYSLAND. [A PRIZE WINNING ESSAY ON THE SUBJECT AT THE POWYS PROVINCIAL EISTEDDFOD, Llanfair, 1913.] By J. MORETON PEARSON. IT has been the lot of few parts of the country to suffer the decline or extinction of trades and industries more than Powysland. In all areas, which are chiefly rural, with little country towns studded in them here and there, the great industrial changes ushered in at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the invention of mechanical power and the growth of the large factory system have brought great changes. Hitherto such communities were largely self support- ing. Not only did local agriculture provide most if not all of the necessary food, but local industry in a more or less rudimentary way provided many of the articles of clothing and of domestic necessity for the use of its own immediate population. Powysland, however, attained to a position of greater industrial importance than that. It was not only a more or less self supporting community, but, at least, in one manufacturing industry­-the manufacture of flannel and woollen fabrics Powysland became the centre of a thriving trade for supplying needs outside its own borders. Other industries too, not coming within the category of manufactures — lead mining and slate quarrying- were also followed to an extent that made them of more than local importance. In the interest of Powysland's history it is well that these facts should be remembered and some record, however humble, made of them at the present time