Not just about the Davies sisters!

Many of us only associate Gregynog Hall – just outside the village of Tregynon – with the wealthy art-collecting sisters, Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who bought it in the 1920s, and turned it into an important centre for music, the arts and fine printing. But it was in fact, until the outbreak of WW1, the heart of a landed estate dating back 800 years.

From the 15^th century it was the home of the Blayney family, local gentry who claimed descent from the early Welsh princes, and in the 19th century the house belonged to the Hanbury-Tracys, who became the barons Sudeley in 1838.

In the 1840s Henry Hanbury Tracy pulled the old house down and rebuilt it in its present form, but retained elements of the old mansion within his new building. He was a pioneer in the use of concrete as a building material, and later added the fake concrete ‘half-timbering’ to the Hall.

The estate had grown over the centuries, until by the 1880s it extended to over 18,000 acres, and was the third largest in Montgomeryshire after the great estates of Powis Castle and Wynnstay.

The estate was broken up in 1913, with many of the farms sold to their sitting tenants, and those farms still exist.

Dr Mary Oldham, who was Gregynog’s librarian, made a study of its history for her doctoral thesis. She will be telling Meifod History Group the story of this ancient landed estate, embracing not only the mansion, its owners and their families, but also its farms, the people who worked in its plantations, warrens, brickyards and lime-kilns, its agents, gamekeepers, tradesmen and women, and its countless labourers and servants.

‘It was,’ she says, ‘more than a landed estate: it was an institution at the heart of the life of the neighbourhood, and remains so even today, despite the changes of the past hundred years.’



The event is free to members of Meifod Local History Group, and costs £4 for non-members.