Welsh Journals

Davies's account, notably of nomenclature and of location, recently led the writer to visit the ground and to look into the sources in the hope of fresh light on the subject. This chapter of Welsh industrial enterprise is better documented than might be expected. There is evidence to be uncovered in sources such as the Chirk Castle and Powis manuscripts at the National Library of Wales, Quaker minute books in the Glamorgan County Record Office, Lloyd family letters in the Society of Friends Library in London and the Dolobran Deeds at Aber- ystwyth, as well as in Kelsall's diary. Documents preserved at Powis Castle also illuminate the matter. The problem of Davies's article is posed by the terms of two of his main headings in which he names and would locate the two forges in question, as follows: 'Pare Mathraval Old Forge' 'Ffridd Mathraval New Forge usually known as Dolobran Forge'. But at once there seems to be a confusion here because Mathraval and Dolobran are in different parishes. And one is soon in some difficulty since the whole question straddles not only two parishes but two rivers, two banks of one of them, sites on either side, several townships and two estates-those of Powis and Lloyd-one in Llangyniew the other in Meifod on opposite sides of the Vyrnwy. This tangle is not made easier to solve by the want of early maps or survey plans or by the tendency for those that there are to be limited to this parish or that estate so that you cannot look at the problem on one scale or by one convention or focus the area as a whole. There is the further problem of mills meaning corn mills, mills meaning furnaces and mills meaning forges; there is also a mill named after a forge (Old Forge Mill) and a forge that has become known as a factory and so appears on maps for 150 years past; and there is a site in the story where no trace of any structure appears either on the ground or on the earliest 25 in. map, whether as mill, furnace, forge or anything else. Mathraval is a township of Llangyniew parish occupying the V-shaped piece of country between the Vyrnwy and Banwy rivers. Pare Mathraval is the name given to a part bordering the Banwy in the south-east of the township area, upstream from the ancient Mathraval Castle. Ffridd Mathraval is the abrupt wooded hill more to the north-west which overhangs the course of the Vyrnwy and closes in the valley of Dolobran. Let us take first Davies's 'Pare Mathraval Forge', erected in 1651, of which and of its early operation under the Myddelton family he gives so interesting an account in his article. "The ruins of the iron mill", he writes, "may still be traced in Parc Mathraval, and the pool on Banwy from which the water was