Who Goes Where? Privacy, Access, and Power on Two Pembrokeshire Estates, 1906-1910
On the southern edge of the Preseli Hills in north Pembrokeshire lies Nant-y-Bugail (the valley of the shepherd) or Nant-y-Gof (the valley of the blacksmith), through which the Afon Cyllell flows west into the Western Cleddau, while the Afon Aer flows north from the watershed to meet the Gwaun.
Trecwn today, with the wooded valley of the Cyllell hooking around to the north.
Ninety years ago it was renowned for its beauty and peaceful seclusion. To the local naturalist Ronald Mathias Lockley, who made winter pilgrimages there to watch the murmurations of the huge flocks of starlings roosting in its ancient woods, it was ‘that wonderful glen’, ‘this most enchanting place’, an ‘evergreen … sanctuary’. ‘It is as if one of the finest slices of the Gwaun Valley had been lifted up and dropped down into a yawning crevice a few miles to the west’, he wrote: ‘a valley like the Doon in Blackmore's immortal story, as guarded by crags, but more verdant with trees and rhododendrons’. [1]
The Valley in 1871.
The Lake in 1871.
Lockley was not the first person to admire it, though he would be among the last to see it like this, in its unspoiled condition. It had been a famous beauty spot for at least 150 years, and was the heart of an estate of more than 4,000 acres, Trecwn (‘House of Dogs’), that had been in the same family for centuries, though with frequent changes in the owners’ surname because of transmission through the female line. By the 19th century it was the property and home of members of the Barham family. This essay will focus on one of them - Francis William Robins Barham, 1841-1926, the last but one Barham squire of Trecwn between 1899 and 1926.
Francis Barham at Trecwn in 1910.
Francis Robins came into the property when he was already 58 years old, from his mother, who had inherited it from her older brother in 1878. That brother, Charles Barham, had owned it since 1840 and made it his main home from the early 1850s until his death. Charles was the principal architect of the estate and its mansion in their final state that survived his death with little change for the next fifty years. He developed Trecwn as a sporting estate, locally celebrated for its fox and otter hunting, hare coursing, and shooting, particularly of woodcock as well as the inevitable pheasants. The valley bottom became dense with rhododendrons, laurels, and alders, providing wonderful covers. The house was large if not particularly attractive, with all the usual accoutrements - formal and walled gardens, aviaries, and stables. It was surrounded with woodland belts joining the mansion grounds, planted with specimen trees, many of them exotics only recently introduced to Britain from the world’s furthest temperate zones, to the ancient native woodlands of the valley.
Trecwn Mansion from the western approach, c. 1917.
Formal Gardens on the West Lawn, 1871.
Francis Barham - always addressed as Captain, though he had risen no higher than Lieutenant in an undistinguished military career, 1859-1872, that ended with his dismissal on grounds of insubordination - was the first resident owner for a generation, and an energetic, argumentative, controlling man, an upper-class English proprietor presiding over a small, scattered community of Welsh tenant farmers and labourers. His land dominated the adjoining parishes of Llanfair Nant-y-Gof and Llanstinan, where he was separated by nationality, class, wealth, religion, and language from his couple of hundred neighbours, most of whom were his tenants and/or employees. Trecwn had a mansion, a school, a church, a chapel, a post office, a shop, and a mill, and little that happened was free from Barham influence or outright control.
But by the early 1900s that control, and the way it was exercised, was not uncontested. The resulting conflicts were not just over the enforcement of the Game Laws against the poaching of pheasants and other valued birds, the snaring of rabbits (food, vermin, or a cash crop to locals; the cherished foxes’ preferred diet, to hunters), and straying by grazing animals into his woods. They included the broader issue of the right of access to and through his estate and, beyond that, the claims of property and status that underpinned his social position.
His principal opponent was the local schoolmaster, David Bonvonni, Welsh and Welsh-speaking despite his surname, who was also his nearest neighbour - the excellent village school, built with Barham money and bearing the Barham name, was just five minutes’ walk from the mansion - and a kind of employee: Francis was ‘Senior and Life Manager’ of this ‘non-provided’ (i.e. Church rather than local council) school. Their relations started out well, but quickly deteriorated over trivial but revealing issues.
In June 1905 Francis wrote to the editor of the County Echo objecting to the fact that David had been referred to in recent coverage (of which he got far more than Francis) as ‘“Mr Bonvonni, Trecwn”. It should be Mr Bonvonni, “Barham Memorial School”, Trecwn, and not Trecwn alone, as that is my address’. But the papers, and David himself, kept using the objectionable short form - not all the time, but probably too often for Francis’s comfort. As if anybody in Trecwn could be better known or more identified with the place than the squire! This was a conflict about status within the small community that Francis could not win. [2]
Then on the 2nd of February 1906 two of Francis’s workmen came to the school at 8-30 one morning to cut the chain to the school bell. David asked them to leave and told them that Francis had no power to order it. This was the culmination of an argument that had been running for more than a year. The problem was that the ringing of the school bell disturbed Francis’s peace and quiet at the Mansion five minutes’ walk away, where he often stayed in bed all morning reading. The two men’s approach to this argument illustrated that they both thought the school was their property - for David, his home, his place of work, his small domain; for Francis, just another part of the estate which he had every right to control. [3]
These arguments were just the warm-up to the major conflict that began later that year and did not altogether end even when Francis managed to get David dismissed in 1922. David was an active and radical Liberal, and quite prepared to stick his neck out. He reacted with fury when Francis’s determined gamekeeper, Fred Bogg, arrested his 12 year-old son for trapping rabbits in 1906, hauled him before the Mathry magistrates, and burdened him with a 10/- fine and 15/6 costs - altogether perhaps around £600 in modern money, given changes in average wages. It was most of a week’s wages for his father.
Barham Memorial School, n.d. but probably c. 1900, F&GHS.
David hit back the best way he could - in print, and widening the issues beyond poaching to include the larger question of who had access to the countryside, and who should control it. As he wrote in the local press:
I denounce this selfish mania for the preservation of game -- preservation for the purpose of destruction. We, country folks, are warned off from the quiet woodland ways, even the road leading to the school is labelled up ‘Private road’. My school children are prohibited from entering the copses to gather wild flowers; and for this are enclosures made fitted up with barbed wire fences all around the school premises. For this curse was my little boy - delicate in health - brought up for sentence before a tribunal of game-preservers. Where does Reason play her part in such a course? Our roadsides here are disfigured by impudent notice-boards, telling our children, in arrogant language suitable to the Philistine, that ‘all trespassers will be prosecuted, all dogs destroyed, and cattle impounded’. It is contumely. Such is the ‘land of Gwalia under the rule of the game-preserver’. [4]
He did not rest there. In March the following year, the County Echo reported on a revolt against Francis’s authority at the council’s annual meeting, where the Rector took the chair in his place and all present (except Francis) voted in favour of the Rector’s motion, seconded by David:
That this parish meeting … does not admit that the road leading from Treforvol Farm, past Trecwn, to Llanychaer, is a private road and it hereby calls upon Mr Francis Robins Barham, of Trecwn, to remove the notice boards, and further declares that it is a public right-of-way. This resolution applies to all the paths in this parish as well. A copy of this was demanded by Mr Barham and given. —The Rev. J. Rees spoke strongly on the stoppage of the right of way, and bore out his statement by quotations from the Act of 1894, and if the wishes of the parishioners were set aside, the District Council and the County Council would be appealed to. [5]
This was a direct attack on the key defence of the estate’s privacy, and its precious game’s security - Barham’s claim that the whole of the road through the valleys of the Cellyll and the Aer to the east of the hamlet of Trecwn, and all of the paths across it, were his, and that only people who had his consent could enter his domain, on his terms. The road was the only route for children to reach the Barham School and also, perhaps incidentally, the only direct route to the nearest pub in the next village.
What explained the Rector’s readiness to speak on his parishioners’ behalf rather than go along with the squire? Perhaps the fact that he had recently been the target of a bruising trespass suit himself, brought by Francis to prevent him leaving his horse in the coach house at a farm next to the church when he came to hold a service. Reverend Rees and his predecessors had been doing so for 50 years, but Francis wanted it for his coach and horses when he came to church. Threatened with a Chancery case for ‘wrongful entry and user’ and an injunction and bill of costs, the Reverend Rees had no option but to give way in January 1907 and promise never to trespass on Francis’s property again. It was a small matter, perhaps, but like Francis’s general insistence on his right to deny access to his property to anybody, it set the landlord’s power against the customary rights of the population over which he presided rather uneasily. [6]
Note how the estate’s woodland wrapped around the School, its proximity to the Mansion, and its distance from the village by the only road; and that the only road from the village through the valley ran straight past the Mansion.
How was this conflict resolved? There were no further complaints of unreasonable restraints on entry, and it seems clear that the community prevailed and Francis gave way. It probably helped that he fell ill in 1908, requiring three operations at the hands of the King’s surgeon at Guy’s Hospital between 1910 and 1916, and having to spend months in a nursing home in London before the last one. Increasingly elderly and infirm, he let out his sporting rights in 1909, so once again the people of the valley were not so troubled by an active, assertive resident proprietor. The boundaries of his property rights had been pushed back.
The consequences were obvious in relations between Francis and his neighbour-enemy David Bonvonni. When Francis attempted to shelter in the porch of the school from a sudden downpour that caught him out in the open with neither coat nor umbrella, it was David who told him to leave, as he had no right to be there, his rank as Senior Life Manager notwithstanding.
Meanwhile David exercised his rights to the full, as Francis’s companion Henriette Miles complained in 1916: David was ‘a rabid Socialist’ who ‘thinks he has as much right on the estate as the owner… he is constantly parading up & down the road right in to the gates in a most offensive manner & to avoid friction, Capt. B. stays in the grounds, practically a prisoner’. Bonvonni ‘& some of his families were always on our road, one cannot stop them as he will argue that there is a right of way’.
So it seems that Francis swallowed his defeat, but it certainly stuck in his and Henriette’s throats. As she put it, ‘It is a lot of trouble yet unless steps are taken to put down the Schoolmaster, there will be no living at Trecwn’. ‘He has been a pest & a nuisance to everyone since he is come, & will be until dislodged’. It would take six more years, but eventually an argument that revolved around the limits on the rights and powers that a landlord’s property and status brought him was resolved in the only satisfactory way, by David’s dismissal and departure, homeless as well as jobless at the age of 58.
Clearly, contentious answers to the question ‘Who goes where?’ had the capacity to set neighbours at one another’s throats even in this quiet rural backwater. Further evidence about this is provided by the only right-of-way issue to reach the courts from the valley during Francis’s period as squire.
In this case, that dragged on for three years from 1907 until 1910, Francis was the plaintiff, not the defendant. He was acting in the interests of his tenants, and with the full support of the community. His aim was to secure his tenants’ rights to use two customary rights of way across the estate of some new neighbours at Llanstinan a couple of miles to his west, who had blocked it by felling trees across the lane to prevent people coming too close to their mansion.
Llanstinan, unlike Trecwn, had passed through many hands, and by sale, not descent, so that by the 1900s the mansion only had a couple of hundred acres around it. For forty years, as the estate shrank with each successive sale, it had been administered by the same local land agent who oversaw Trecwn for Francis Barham’s mother and uncle, and the property had often been tenanted or vacant, with no resident proprietor at all.
During all of this time its farming neighbours had grown accustomed to using the estate’s entrance drive west to the main Haverfordwest-Fishguard road near Letterston, and even the section that branched off through the main gates, past the house, stables, and home farm, and north to another county road at a farm called Bengal. They used these convenient short cuts for driving cattle and sheep to market at Fishguard, to get to the station at Letterston, to go shopping, for visiting from farm to farm, and to carry corpses in procession to funerals - a key fact, because Pembrokeshire custom was that any ‘corpse road’ would become a right of way.
When the new proprietor, a prosperous local woman called Jessie Griffiths, moved in, she was understandably unenthusiastic about these invasions of her privacy. So she ordered trees felled across the drive to close one of the short cuts, and asserted her right to bar access to her estate.
The Disputed Rights of Way: the track along the valley from Trecwn that turned into the main drive to the front lodge New Bridge; and the drive right in front of and around the house, and then to Bengal.
The most heavily disputed area, magnified: right past the house to Bengal. Note how a track through wet, rough pasture from Trecwn turns into a proper road on the Llanstinan estate. There was a gate at the end of the rough grazing, to control cattle.
Francis had an interest in this case because of the inconvenience it caused to his tenants, particularly at Fronrhydd farm, who found themselves stuck in a dead-end with no way out to the west or north. He and his new land agent attempted to settle the argument by friendly conversations between neighbouring proprietors but they got nowhere, so in 1909 Francis had to resort to the law.
This time he won, in a case widely reported for its fascinating testimony, spread across four days, and its amusement value, especially Lord Coleridge’s difficulty with Welsh witnesses and place names - ‘the Judge with a despairing gesture said, I pant after you in vain’. The only way he could follow the testimony, even in translation, was with the aid of a map where farms were numbered as well as named.
The best witnesses were the oldest, and there were several of them - identified by Francis’s solicitor as his key assets. The decades of absentee ownership and hands-off management had allowed habits and memories of use to build up, providing all of the evidence required to establish these at law: ‘enjoyment as of right and without interruption from time immemorial, or for forty years or for 20 years before this action’, plain words whose precise legal meaning the judge spelled out very carefully for the special jury of local farmers and landowners. The result was not a public right of way for all and sundry, but something narrower: a right for Francis, his tenants, and their employees to use Llanstinan’s driveways with their ‘carriages, carts, horses, and cattle, and on foot’.
You can see why Mrs. Griffiths was not keen to have such traffic going straight past her front door, but when she ordered those trees felled she had probably not reckoned that the cost of her futile resistance would be so high. The press estimated it at £1,000 (perhaps £450,000 nowadays), because though she only had to pay Francis a farthing’s damages, she had to pay his costs as well as her own. This figure may have been an exaggeration: Francis’s costs were only a bit more than a tenth of that sum. But even so, both neighbours had been prepared to invest a great deal of time and money in the defence of customary and property rights, respectively. And in this case, just like on Francis’s own estate, it was the claim of local custom that triumphed.
How did Mrs. Griffiths take her loss? At a guess, no better than Francis had. She moved out, and at the census in 1911 Llanstinan House was once again let to tenants, a young army officer and his family, who were perhaps less affronted by the rustic traffic coming down their drive.
* * *
What became of these rights of way, so strenuously and, in the Llanstinan case, expensively asserted? They lasted for a quarter of a century. Then, in 1936, the Admiralty purchased (by agreement, but under the threat of compulsion) a thousand acres of the Llanstinan and Trecwn estates in order to establish a huge naval arms depot taking advantage of the valley’s isolation, topography, and geology.
Llanstinan’s driveway was widened, straightened, and turned into the main vehicle access from the A40 to the depot’s front gate in Trecwn itself. The drive past the house to Bengal reverted to being a private lane, but the road from New Bridge to Trecwn became a public highway with a railway branch line alongside it.
Trecwn itself was not so lucky: the heart of the estate was ripped out, all of the public rights of way along and across the valley extinguished, and the arms depot surrounded by an eight-mile-long high-security fence guarded by military police. After sixty years the Navy left, and for the last thirty the old arms depot site has slowly decayed, largely vacant, in private ownership. But the security fence is still there, though increasingly full of holes, with a handful of private security personnel inside it. The only people who can enter into the valleys of the Cyllell and the Aer between the main gate at Trecwn and the back gate at Llanychaer at the very edge of the National Park are urban explorers. As for the general public, we are even more excluded than in the bad old days of landlordism a hundred and more years ago.
Howell Harris is a retired historian of American business and technology who is experiencing a rebirth as an amateur historian of wildlife and landscape conservation in Pembrokeshire, alongside other aspects of local history.
[1] Lockley Diary 23 Nov. 1933, 8 Jan. 1932, 23 Nov. 1936, NLW. The article resulting from this final visit is “Over the Hills to the Birds’ Dormitory,” Western Mail 23 Dec. 1936, p. 14, a lyrical piece of nature writing.
[2] F.R. Barham, “Trecwn,” County Echo 29 June 1905, p. 3.
[3] Typed “Log Book Entries” in Papers relating to an enquiry in respect of the teaching of Mr D E Bonvonni, headmaster of Barham Memorial School, Trecwn, 1922-1923, ## HDX/1487/15, Accession No. 4449, Pembrokeshire County Record Office (hereafter PCRO).
[4] David E. Bonvonni, “Trecwn Game Trespass Case. Defendant’s Version,” Pembrokeshire County Guardian 5 Oct. 1906, p. 7.
[5] “Trecwn, Letterston. A Right-of-Way Question,” County Echo 28 Mar. 1907, p. 2.
[6] Papers relating to a dispute about trespass at Llanfair farm, [Llanfairnantygof], between Captain Barham and Rev. John Rees, [Vicar of Letterston], 13 Aug. 1906 - 7 Jan. 1907, ## HDX/1487/9, Accession No. 4449, PCRO.