I was hoping for this time was to find " Llyswen Farm " because this definite place name had turned up in something that I had read when checking my facts about Thelwall.
I was checking the facts about " Citizen " John Thelwall because I was using him as an example of how in the 1790's previously respectable republicans were portrayed as criminals.
John Thelwall was from a very respectable family from mid Wales, educated and an educator : a poet, writer, lecturer and public orator - and a radical who was tried for treason.
He was one of the people that Edward Williams was visiting in prison when he first signed his name " Iolo Morgannwg, Bard of Liberty " in the visitors' book and wrote a poem after.
We set out to find John Thelwall's " cottage " that has been described as his " hermitage " at " Llyswen Farm." We walked up to the house indicated by the local cafe owner across from the green and down the lane by the church - given that it stands opposite the church it appears to have been the old manor house and is called " Ty Mawr." Today it was a building site.
I had a chat with a man on the ground floor and he called his boss, perhaps his father, who came down and talked to me. He is from the area and knows about John Thelwall, and he told me that Lady Bingley ( - ?) had asked him to come out of retirement to do this job - he had been responsible for the previous renovation work done thirty years ago. He took me over to an internal wall where the floor boards are presently taken up and showed me that it stood on stone foundations and offered this opinion. Nobody seems to be sure of where John Thelwall's " cottage " stood if it was a cottage, except that this was quite a big farm with the tithe barn opposite the house showing the kind of range of buildings around the main house with some buildings now non-existent evident close by in mounds traceable in the fields / yards surrounding it. His opinion, having pulled the main house apart twice now, is that John Thelwall's " cottage " was in fact Ty Mawr and that this was pulled down in the middle of the 19th century and the stone used to back the red brickwork of the present mid Victorian house ( whose red brick gothicke I think has an early 1850's sort of style, but I do not know when the railway arrived in this area.)
He reckoned that the original house was very nearly the same size as the one that replaced it, but I could not discern whether he meant that the red brick is a veneer in some places over the original structure which is not unkown. When he refurbished the house thirty years ago he repaired some original doors and when I admired a gothicke looking door he told me that he had in fact made that one himself by nailing mouldings over the door to create a complimentary style - if he did he is clearly a fairly skilled carpenter. The drive has been redesigned with new serpentine walls from the gates which are newly built from rubble which apparently has either been taken from the recent demolition of this house or of some other building - he and I had a discussion about the limewash still adhering to some of the stones which he scraped off referring to it as " ochre " although it was not red, perhaps there are some buildings locally that are limewashed in a red colour ?
Naturally having worked in architecture I am a bit wary of bullshit by builders but he was certainly skilled and he was not talking about his own property so he had nothing to lose in offering me this opinion. What do you think ? Do you think that an older Ty Mawr - and the tithe barn might well be 15 th century - was John Thelwall's " hermitage " ? It seems a little too big to me if it was perhaps a church farm with this parish tithe barn next to it, and I understood it to be the case that John Thelwall withdrew from the London scene to seek safety in the hills as a shepherd until " The English Terror " had run its course - but of course it never did, we are still living with the consequences.
If you know otherwise and I am still barking up the wrong tree as to where John Thelwall retreated - do tell me !!! Perhaps you know somebody in Cadw etc who knows ???
Regards,
David Lawrence.
John Thelwall : Biography
John Thelwall, the son of a silk mercer, was born in 1764. He first became involved in politics when he campaigned on behalf of John Horne Tooke in the in the ... Images for John Thelwall
- Report imagesSolomonescu - Introduction - John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments ...
www.rc.umd.edu › ... › John Thelwall: Critical Reassessments1. Almost two centuries after his death, the Romantic-period political reformer John Thelwall is undergoing a remarkable critical renaissance. In the past five ...
