Welsh Journals

the Lewis and Lewis Lloyd family, and before them of the Powells, to whom they became linked by the marriage of a Lewis heir to a Powell heiress.53 Demolished before the drowning (early in the 20th century) of the Elan valley, Nantgwyllt was a house Shelley visited and of which he tried to obtain a lease. It was later to be associated with Francis Brett Young's bestseller 'The House Under the Water', though the book's characters were creatures of fancy, in no way based on the real inhabitants of that secluded mansion in a doomed valley. Marriages of more romance than prudence ran in the family. Elizabeth's grandfather had married a kinswoman who was also his maidservant, and kept the marriage secret from his mother.54 Their daughter Elizabeth Mary (who was dead by the time her daughter married Peter) had eloped with her huntsman, John Lewis. Peter and Elizabeth, wrote Rhys Gwesyn Jones, were a handsome couple, thought by the inhabitants of Abergwesyn to be immensely rich. Elizabeth was an impulsive, emotional young bride. She and Peter started their married life at Nantybrain (Plate 1), possibly because extensive building work was again in progress at Lhvynderw. (A sale-notice of 1831 calls it a twenty-year-old house, which seems to indicate that David's version built in the 1790s was altered or enlarged soon after his death.) Elizabeth lost her first child by tumbling downstairs in a great hurry to welcome her father, who had unexpectedly called to see her. Between 1815 and Plate l.-Nantybrain.