Land is an enigma. It is soil, roads, houses and mountains, but more than any or all of those. It is, in a sense, all we have as humans. It is everywhere. It is, you would think, the planet’s gift to us. Yet access to it and ownership of it are fiercely contested. At the same time, across the United Kingdom, mouldering myths and rumours never seem to change that much. Choose your grudge: Most land is inherited. The church owns loads if it. The MoD owns even more. No, it’s forestry that owns it! The Queen owns everything, in the end. According to the government (whatever its stripe), media, banks, your peers and mum and dad (probably), owning property is one of life’s central goals.
But, who owns Wales? It’s a question that echoes back though time to Edward I’s invasions and castle-building schemes and the 1284 ‘annexation’ and right up to the present, including the holiday cottage burnings of 1979–1991 and the 2006 Government of Wales Act, which devolved a tranche of land management laws.
According to Dr Shaun Evans, director of the Institute for the Study of Welsh Estates at Bangor University, land ownership was a key factor at some of the most totemic clashes in modern Welsh history.
In the nineteenth century you see significant regional protests such as the Rebecca Riots and Tithe War incorporating grievances relating to land. In the 1880s and 1890s land in Wales – and in particular the relationship between landowner and tenant – emerges as a major political issue, fully aligned with the political goals of a vibrant radical nonconformity. This land reform agenda eventually led to the appointment of a Welsh Land Commission: a massive analysis of the role of estates in Welsh society.
Despite these pressures, the landowning dominance of the gentry, aristocracy and squirearchy remained remarkably secure into the early twentieth century.
In the national anthem – composed in 1856 – Evan James (here in WS Gwynn Williams’ translation) juxtaposes Welsh land and the Welsh language: ‘Though foemen have trampled my land ’neath their feet,/The language of Cambria still knows no retreat.’ The colonies of Ohio and Patagonia were an attempt to take the language and use it to Welshify far-off territories. Welsh people often self-identify as farmers or the descendants of farmers, but this occupation has most often been carried out in a tenant-landowner relationship; in a sense, much of Welsh history can be framed as unfolding on land owned by ‘others’.
After the First World War, Welsh landowership underwent major transformation, says Evans.
The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the sale, demise and shrinking of many landed estates and their associated country houses. There are huge collections of sale catalogues – usually with maps – which record how much land that were sold during this period, the purchasers often being the former tenants.
The late Dr. John Davies calculated that in 1887, about 90% of cultivated land in Wales formed part of landed estates; by 1970 about 62% of cultivated land was owned directly by freehold farmers. This represents a huge shift in landownership and society.
Yet, for all that, land is still a hotly contested issue. Welsh house prices and a lack of social housing mean thousands of people cannot own even the smallest patch of it. Great swathes of territory are in the hands of wealthy foreigners, utilities companies, forestry firms, UK government bodies, trusts and freehold farmers, and anonymous strangers. Access – even of the most rudimentary kind, to walk or ride a bicycle – is a grey area outside of a few national parks – and even there ‘wild camping and other activities are forbidden or restricted.
Records such as estate maps, title deeds, enclosure acts, surveys, valuations and rentals allow academics to piece together historical pictures of landownership. Tithe Maps, digitised by the National Library of Wales, and evolving resources such as Bangor’s Deep Mapping project, mean that specialists can increasingly draw a clear picture of historical land use.
But getting a map of local rights of way or finding why a patch of green space is walled and barbed-wired – often without any signage to show ownership – is extremely difficult. Why is the buying and selling, and possession, of land such an opaque enterprise?
These are some of the questions that prompted Dr Sioned Hâf, a community energy researcher at Bangor University, to set up Who Owns Wales (https://whoownscymru.org) – a ‘collective attempt’ to create a comprehensive picture of land and property across Wales.
Who Owns Wales https://whoownscymru.org has been on the backburner for a few years now, ever since I conducted research on community renewable energy projects in Scotland and Wales as part of my doctorate. Interviews with community activists raised a recurring issue – that of land ownership or, in some cases, riverbed ownership – and how it could impact on the development of a community renewable project.
Hâf visited a number of Scottish communities that had bought land from former estate owners or, in the case of the Isle of Eigg in the Inner Hebrides, an entire island. She says community ownership of land allowed citizens to develop their renewable projects and sustainability goals – cultural, economic, environmental – in far more straightforward ways.
They could develop their own wind turbines, hydro projects, and local economic strategies, without first having to go cap in hand to seek permissions or pay land rent to private, individual landowners.
The work in turn led her to Who Owns Scotland (1996), by Andy Wightman – the MSP for Lothian region – which looked at the historical ownership of land and current issues and debates following the Scottish Governments land reforms. ‘It is an odd state of affairs that it is easier to find out the ownership of land in 1915 than it is in 2018,’ he writes. ‘With modern technology such as digital mapping, satellite imagery, online technology and smartphones, we have yet to come close to what the Edwardians achieved with paper maps and ink.’
His book goes some way towards redressing this lack of current information. In 2019, Who Owns England by Guy Shrubsole was published. Building on Wightman’s work and Kevin Cahill’s 2001 book Who Owns Britain, Shrubsole – a staff member at Friends of the Earth – linked land ownership with issues around the environment, climate and wildlife conservation. His book evolved out of a website of the same name.
Seeing no comparable resources for Wales, Hâf and colleague Amy Spike Lewis, ‘more adept at mapping than myself’, created the bilingual Who Owns Wales site https://whoownscymru.org in order to start the process of gathering data and establishing a network.
The main issue is knowledge. We don’t really know anything much about who owns what, why they own it, or how they came to own it. There’s some information on the properties of public bodies, but that is less than half the picture.
So, to start with, it would be interesting to just know who owns what, then move on to ask some fundamental questions about the effect of these patterns of ownership, how it helps or impedes Wales in how our citizens are able to have access to, and develop or conserve our land in a way that is environmentally sound, and socially just.
What I would like the project to achieve mainly, is for it to be a one stop shop for anybody wanting to see, in the most simple terms possible, ownership patterns across Wales. At the moment, you would need to trawl through a number of websites, books, research articles, political developments and maps etc. to get the full picture. We hope to condense all of this work, so that everything is made more accessible and clear in one place. The project will attempt to collate all the work that has happened previously, aim to fill any gaps, and to draw a modern map of ownership in Wales.
While certain features of land ownership are common to the United Kingdom – the tentacular reach of the Royal Family, the dukedoms and earldoms, major housebuilders such as Taylor Wimpey – each country has a different history and a different sense of damage or pain in relation to the way land has been used, stolen, sullied and sold on.
‘I don’t think that we have such obvious cultural scars as are evident in Scotland in relation to their Highland Clearances, or in the north of Ireland and the effect of the Ulster plantations,’ says Hâf. ‘Our experience of the privatisation of land seems to have happened in a more insidious way, more similar perhaps to what the English have experienced.’
‘The enclosure of common land in Wales, was a reflection of what happened in England, due to us having followed the same English Common law since the Statute of Rhuddlan and being merged into the English realm by the Acts of Union. Welsh commoners suffered the same impacts of land privatisation, the formation of estates and the enclosure acts of common land as the English. What might be different is the scale of resource depletion – coal, copper and slate, for instance – that has happened in Wales since the privatisation of land.
‘We might not have the same vast numbers of private estates as there are in England and Scotland, but we certainly have some which we will be investigating further. Land ownership within the farming sector is also something interesting to look at in Wales, particularly with the number of small farms having shrunk and super farms having grown.’
The Crown Estate, the corporate arm of the Royal Family which raises revenues from the Queen’s £14bn property portfolio to bankroll the limos, choppers, skiing holidays and butlers, is of particular interest.
‘These [Crown properties] have been devolved to Scotland since 2017, but this hasn’t happened in Wales,’ says Hâf. ‘We hope to look at how much revenue our Welsh Parliament could get from devolving those estates.’
Another key focus is the MOD, which has sizeable jurisdictions across the nations and has been responsible for outrages such as Epynt in the Brecon Beacons where, in June 1840, 54 farms were evicted.
Dr Hâf sees the general ignorance of Welsh land laws and possessions as part of a wider problem.
We’re a nation of people who continuously need to swot up and educate ourselves on our social history, since our education system has failed to teach it to us. We’re more likely to know about the history of the house of Tudors than our own, local folk history.
This is particularly the case with ownership history. For example, I have no idea about how the Welsh comprehended ownership issues, before we became so closely merged with English common law. Had the concept of ownership and private property been thrust upon us? Did we view the land in a different way – not as something solely to own? I also have no idea of how much land in my area of Carmarthenshire has been privatised through the enclosure acts of the 18th and 19th century. There’s so much to learn.
Who Owns Wales/ Pwy Bia Cymru https://whoownscymru.org is not alone in its campaign to widen knowledge. From Nick Hayes’ recent The Book of Trespass (2020) to the newly established Slow Ways group – which aims at mapping walkable routes across Great Britain – to recent Welsh Government-funded research into the viability of a local land-value tax, there is a lot of interest in land reform. Hayes and Shrubsole collaborated on a successful Right to Roam petition, which won backing from the Ramblers and other established organisations. Chris Blake’s Project Skyline (https://skyline.wales/about) is looking at how three communities – Treherbert, Ynysowen and Caerau in the Valleys– can transform their local landscape by taking full control of its development. Innovative bodies such as Monmouthshire-based Our Food (https://our-food.org/crickhowell/) are exploring ways to redistribute agricultural land (88% of Wales’ area) and advance small-scale, sustainable farming initiatives.
Wales has a proud history of land rights protests, from community-led battles against the flooding of Tryweryn from 1955–65 to the recent outcry against Cardiff Council’s approval of a Military Medical Museum on one of the last patches of green space in Cardiff Bay. But the protesters rarely triumph.
‘These experiences of land being taken from the commons continues,’ says Hâf . ‘It is not just a story of the past. It will probably become more prominent if anything, as people become more aware of the precious little green belt land that are left in urban areas – particularly since they became so important for people during the Covid-19 pandemic, and with more awareness of the ecological and environmental crises.’
Will knowledge further the cause of the ‘commoners’? Hâf and Spike Lewis are currently publishing blogs about general ownership issues in Wales, getting familiar with the resources that are available and exploring beyond the limited data divulged by HM Land Registry. Where land has been passed on for generations and centuries, there is liable to be no public record whatsoever.
‘It is quite a mammoth task, so anyone out there who has done any relevant research is encouraged to get in touch,’ says Dr Hâf. ‘We want to publish reliable research and ideas on all ownership related subjects on the website and encourage anyone with an interest to get in touch.’
Ultimately, we cannot separate land and human nature. Dr Shaun Evans says, of the post-medieval period:
The ownership of these estates – whether small or sprawling – contributed enormously to the social status of their owners, and through inheritance, many of them succeeded in maintaining and expanding their holdings for generations, providing the foundation for those gentry lineages which exerted enormous influences in Welsh society and politics for centuries.
So landownership mattered: it not only provided essential sources of income for owners, it invested them with an interest and influence in the communities which overlaid their territories.
Plus ça change. In 2021, land and property are still the most explicit, desirable, saleable symbols of authority, character and power. Gleaning factual information is usually seen by the entitled as a step towards wresting back control. Raymond Williams has argued that land in Wales has undergone so many changes of use that ‘continuity… seems a merely mythical construct.’ Of course, this has long been the aim of gentry and aristocracy, mega-farmer and developer. How can the Welsh value – or, dare I say, love – land that they have never owned or controlled? The question of ‘Who Owns Cymru?’, as well as determining the shenanigans, stitch-ups and land-grabs of the past 750 years, is fundamentally about who will own the future of Wales.
Chris Moss is a writer from the north-west of England.
Photo of survey stone at Penrhyndeudraeth, courtesy of Shutterstock.
An exhibition on the theme of commoners’ rights, We Are Commoners: Creative Acts of Commoning, opens on 26 March at Oriel Gregynog, Newtown, and runs until 26 June; it showcases issues of traditional and historical land-based commoner issues, through fashion-based commons (featuring ‘stitch hacking’) and mobile commoner communities springing from undocumented migrant groups.