And then the bubble burst ...

Falcondale, an Italianate villa built by the Harford family of Blaise Castle, Bristol in 1821 and now a Country House Hotel, can perhaps be seen as an early 'Welsh Holiday Home'. Their Welsh estate, which even now includes a working farm was used to supply the family with seasonal produce. As well as buying the estate of Pant y Curyll , raising the old farm house and anglisizing the name, the family also bought the ruined Peterwell, Eighteenth Century home of the notorious 'Wicked Squire', Herbet Lloyd - one of the arch baddies of the Nanteos novels.

The Harford family's fortune derived from trade, banking and brass manufacture, all three strands being linked to the slave trade. They traded with Virginia; part owned a brass battery company producing brass ware for the domestic market as well as export to the African Slavers on the West Coast of Africa and most likely manillas, a currency associated with the Transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. John Scandrett Harford was also a member of the Bristol merchant Venturers’ Guild who supported the slave trade.

However, when his son, John Scandrett Junior took over the estate in 1815, he and his wife Louisa often met with the abolitionists Hannah More and William Wilberforce at Blaise. Did either visit the holiday ‘cottage’? One wonders how far the son was able to atone for the ‘sins of his father’? Would be a good subject for a book.

Back now to their estate in Wales where the Ceredigion Members of the National Trust were having lunch on a murky November day in 2023. After a good meal in the handsome surroundings of the villa, I stood up at the invitation of their dynamic Chair Judy Lile to talk about the Cardiganshire gentry in the Eighteenth Century. A relatively small group, intermarrying between the estates e.g. Nanteos, Peterwell; Llanerchaeron ; Mynachlog Fawr, Ystrad Fflur; Gogerddan and juggling the major political and legal offices between them, it seemed charged to be telling their often less than worthy story in that fine dining room.

The audience of NT Members was a rewarding one and as everyone left, I went to my car to change into my hiking boots. It was growing dark as I walked out into the gardens with their lawns, beds and specimen trees. I moved through a small copse where blackbirds were making their last calls and then out into what remained of a surely once magnificent walled garden. Two rows of ancient apple trees had survived, each skirted by a huge crop of fallen fruit. They had been well tended until recently and were still shapely, but how have we arrived at this point – to let a thousand apples rot on the ground?

My feet soaking wet from the long grass, I turned back. The house, lit now against the dark, vibrated with the promise of warmth, good cheer and good company as I left down the estate road. Imagining acres of fields in which I could gather up the umbilical chord attaching me to the Nineteenth Century it was a shock to reach a housing estate and the ‘suburbs’ of the town of Llanbedr Pont Steffan in the time it took to change from first to fourth gear. One of the slave traders arguments was that enslaved people often had a better quality of life than the European poor: what a piquant irony.