Welsh Journals

progress of their children and garden became again their most important concerns. NOTES: ^hese papers are unpublished and uncatalogued. Any material for which no specific reference is given may be presumed to come from them. 2Most of these were catalogued by W. de Gray Birch in 1903. They will be referred to by the number given by him. 3Referred to throughout as "Collins letters". "Country houses near Penrice. 5See Letters of Sydney Smith ed. Nowell C. Smith. He was the curate of Netheravon where Thomas Talbot's cousins, the Beaches, lived. He became tutor to Michael Hicks Beach's son and, with the boy, toured Wales in the summer of 1799. 6The governess of Mary Lucy Fox Strangeways and, for a while, of her children. 7Baker: A Picturesque Guide through Wales. 1795. 8Penrice Papers-Mary Talbots diary. 9Outside one of the gates of Penrice. 10In the first census (1801) Swansea's population is recorded as 6,099 (Cardiff only 1,870). By 1811 Swansea's population had risen to 8,196 (Cardiff 2,457). "H. Skrine. A Tour of South Wales. 1798. 12Rees: Topographical and Historical Description of South Wales. 13See E. H. Stuart Jones: The Last Invasion of Britain. 14i.e. the ships from which the French landed. Open Fields in Gower by F. V. EMERY This TITLE reads as if it might be a command to throw down the Gower hedges and let in a host of new land-users, caravanners perhaps, or pony- trekkers. Instead it introduces an important and problematical facet of the history of landscape in Gower. We are used to seeing a rural landscape that is held together by fields enclosed with hedges or fences, some thick, some thin, here trim, there wild and tangled. Faced with the modern scene we can therefore ask if the Gower farmers always took the trouble to organise their property in separate fields, making them physically distinct one from the other by hedges or fences. Have the hedges been there from the start as part and parcel of farming life in Gower? If that is true, how old are they in historical terms-even in prehistoric terms? Or was there an early time when the farmed land did not lie in enclosed fields, but arranged itself differently?