Rhyd y Clafdy
Wern Fawr
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Historic background
There are two possible prehistoric defended
enclosures, either side of the marsh on slightly raised ground
at Bwlch Gwyn, 600m south of Rhyd y Clafdy and on a spur overlooking
the marsh at Tyddyn Bychan (PRNs 43382, 4381).
During the middle ages the marsh was known as Ystrad Geirch or Nant
Geirch, these being the alternative names for the free township which
occupied the western side of the fen. Six gwelyau of the progeny of
Dywrig had landed interests in Ystradgeirch, as did the heirs of the
gwely Wyrion Eigion and several members of the kindred of Cenythlin
in the fourteenth century. The freeholders of the gwely Dywrig had
a particular focus on Ystrad Geirch with a geographical localisation
extending across the marsh from Bodfel to Llangian. Their mills were
are Werthyr, south of Nanhoron, and Kirgh (?Ceirch, perhaps in the
vicinity of Rhyd y Clafdy). Thirteenth-century valuations record 18
tenant families at Ystrad Geirch, in possession of 187 cattle, 24 horses,
30 sheep, 39 draught animals and the potential for producing 67 crannocks
of flour and 14 crannocks of grain.
The southern part of this area was occupied, in part, by the bond township
of Wystnyn and the hamlet of Bachellyn, on the flood plain, just north
of Llanbedrog. Two thirds of Bachellyn were emancipated, by concession
of the former Prince of Wales, the third part remained bond, as was
the rest of the township.
At the western end of the coastal marsh lay the medieval townships
of Penyberth and Penrhos. Penrhos was a bond township of the Bishop
of Bangor, occupied by 22 tenants in two gwelyau and holding around
60 acres of arable land which was worked jointly. Penyberth, with its
focus within the bend of the Geirch, lay adjacent, to the west. Penyberth
was a small bond township of no more than seven families who had any
substantial movables. Nevertheless, by the later nineteenth century,
Penyberth was farming 300 acres. Between them, these two medieval townships
held 42 cattle, 10 horses and 7 draught animals. There were also sheep
at Penyberth and they harvested and milled oats, wheat and some barley.
Among the customary rents owed by these tenants, who, before their
labour dues were commuted for cash, did works on the former Prince’s
manor at Pwllheli and worked in the fields at the Autumn harvest and
harrowed in Lent. They also fetched and carried and made repairs to
the water corn mill. In addition to the gwely lands, there were 40
acres of the royal demesne of Pwllheli in that place. The present village
of Rhyd-y-Clafdy incorporates in its name, the concept of a ‘clafdy’ or
leper-house. Such leper-houses are sometimes recorded in association
with royal commotal maerdrefi, usually at the limits, rather than at
the core, of the maerdref. It is possible, but not certain, that this
reference to a ‘clafdy’ is an indication of such an institution
in the vicinity.
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To the north of Penrhos and Penyberth lay
the small free gafael of Gellidara, whose associations were
with Elernion in the cantref of Arfon, some distance to the
north.
In the early nineteenth century, about two-thirds of the coastline
between Llanbedrog and Pwllheli was enclosed, drained and reclaimed.
In 1936 a decision was taken to establish an RAF bombing school at
Penyberth, including the area of the low plateau in the bend of the
river where the Afon Penrhos joins the Afon Geirch. Opposition was
strongly felt, particularly as it was perceived that the sixteenth
century house, Penyberth was, in Saunders Lewis’ words, ‘one
of the essential homes of Welsh culture, idiom and literature’.
As work proceeded, an arson attack was initiated. Nevertheless, the
base came into operation in February 1937. During July and October
1940 the base was attacked six times by the Luftwaffe. In consequence
No. 312 (Czech) Squadron was moved in to protect Penrhos. Another airfield
(RAF Hell’s Mouth) had already been established as a relief landing
ground for Penrhos, five miles to the south and was upgraded after
the attacks of 1940. RAF Penrhos remained operational until October
1946 providing armament, air observer, bombing and gunnery training.
Twenty acres of the Penrhos site is now owned by the Polish Housing
Society, in consequence of the requirement to house Eastern European
soldiers under British command at the end of the war, following a lease
and then sale of the base by the Air Ministry.
Key historic landscape characteristic
•An area of alkaline fen, important
for its environmental significance.
•Clear indications of enclosure and
reclamation along the coastal edge and an important crossing
point of the fens on stone causeways and bridges at Penrhos
and Rhyd y Clafdy.
Cors Geirch is a low-lying area of marshland
which extends from Edern in the north to the Cardigan Bay coastline,
east of Llanbedrog. The character area boundary which is not
exactly coterminous with the environmental designation of Cors
Geirch, is identified by the 30-40m contour extending from
the south of Edern and Morfa Nefyn, bounded on the west by
Ceidio, Madryn and the eastern slopes of Carneddol; on the
east by the gently rising ground of Boduan and Bodfel and includes
the coastal marshes of Penrhos between Llanbedrog and the west
end of Pwllheli.
Much of the interest in the Cors Geirch character
area is the environmental significance of the alkaline fen
and its vegetation, which includes bog myrtle, purple moor
grass, blunt-flowered rush, common reed, great fen sedge and
the rare slender cottongrass. The marsh is also the only locality
known in Wales to support Desmoulin’s whorl snail.
Nevertheless, the historian will take greater interest in the landscape,
economy and social and dynastic relationships which come together in
the central and southern area of Cors Geirch These touch on the extensive
interests of freeholding lordships, the Bishop of Bangor, and the adjacent
maerdref of Afloegion at Pwllheli, including the possibility of, in addition
to the Prince’s demesne at Penyberth, a ‘clafdy’ or
leper-house near Rhyd-y-Clafdy as a manorial adjunct.
The area is wet and marshy and few roads cross
it, except in the furthest north of the area at Plasyngheidio
and, importantly, in the south at Rhyd-y-Clafdy where there
is a nineteenth-century bridge, and on the Afon Rhyd-hir, crossed
by a causewayed bridge at Pont Rhyd-hir, where there is also
a mill (Rhyd = Ford).
The coastline between Penrhos and the west end of Pwllheli, as described
in the History section, was enclosed and drained in the early nineteenth
century. The pattern of this landscape is characteristic of this period
of agricultural and landscape improvement. This localised area is transacted
by drainage ditches but remains wet in the winter. The vegetation is
rough and coarse and colonised by scrubby trees. The present road from
Llanbedrog to Pwllheli, which corresponds with the line of the nineteenth-century
road, is carried on a causeway above the wet ground and lined with low
stone walls. A golf course has been laid out at the western end and along
the coastal fringe.
The history of the low Penrhos plateau is a significant one which lends
character to this part of the landscape. The medieval background to later
events is represented only by the clawdd banks of small irregular fields
at both Penyberth and Penrhos, indicative, in their occasional curving
outlines and narrow dimensions, of parcels of former arable quillets.
The World War 2 landscape of the 1936-1946 RAF base is still visible
and is overlain by the succeeding village of Polish expatriate soldiers,
established at the end of the War. The political dimension regarding
the construction of the air base in 1936 continues to be remembered in
Welsh Nationalist politics.
Crugan Farm, on the eastern fringe of Llanbedrog, is important for its
surviving seventeenth and eighteenth century-features and outbuildings,
including its eighteenth-century barn. Wern Fawr, on the western edge
of the marsh is an important gentry farmhouse. Geoffrey Parry of Rhydolion
married Margaret Hughes, heiress of Cefn Llanfair and Wern Fawr in the
seventeenth century, bringing Wern Fawr into the Love-Parry orbit, later
of Madryn. The house, of sixteenth-century date, is of un-coursed rubble
in two storeys but, apparently, had a dormer or dormers in the eighteenth
century. The front façade has a four-centred arched doorway with
broad quarter-round moulding, very badly abraded on the jambs, and a
corresponding hood mould. The window openings (with modern pivoting casements)
are tall and narrow and not exactly symmetrical. One window is blocked.
There are chimney flues in the thickness of each gable wall, with tall
stacks. The north stack is set diagonally.
Other than the Polish community at Penrhos
House and the dispersed settlement at Penrhos itself, there
is only one nucleated village in this character area; Rhyd-y-Clafdy.
The Afon Geirch is crossed by an early nineteenth-century,
three-arched bridge. In the nineteenth century there was an
Inn, ‘Tuhwnt i’r Afon’ (‘The Other
Side of the River’), 300m east of the bridge. The core
of the village clustered near the river with a smithy close
to the bridge on the west side. Across the road, on the north
side, there was a terrace of six two-storey houses and a large
and well kept chapel, complete with chapel house, built in
1881. The smithy building still survives with a row of early
nineteenth-century two-storey cottages adjacent and which lend
character to the village. The walls are local rubble with stone
chimney stacks.
Across the road there had been further expansion in the Victorian period.
These later, Victorian, two-storey terraced houses on the north side
are of differing size and proportions but all have stone walls, probably
quarried and mostly rendered, with brick chimney stacks. During the twentieth
century, the area to the south of the road, on both sides of the river,
has seen further infill, in particular a modern estate, south east of
the chapel.
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