The Elan Valley and Percy Bysshe Shelley

(R/D/LEW)

Powys Archives holds a significant amount of records relating to the Elan Valley, near Rhayader. A quantity of material pre-dates the building of the dams and provides a poignant reminder of the communities and families who were forced to move to make way for the new development. An extensive collection of records deposited by Welsh Water Authority provides an almost complete record of the construction of the dams and associated buildings. 

The large manor house of Nantgwyllt, one of two historic houses lost to the Elan dams scheme, was in the lower valley of the River Claerwen, close to its meeting point with the Elan River. Like Cwm Elan, the other large house in the next valley, it was linked with the great English poet Shelley who was desperate to secure it in 1812 as a home in which to settle with Harriet, his young new wife.

Two letters written by the poet Shelley and held by Powys Archives illustrate his desire to move to Radnorshire. After eloping with Harriet Westbrook and marrying her in Edinburgh in 1811, they began looking for a house to purchase.  They travelled to mid-Wales, and the newly married couple moved into Nantgwyllt house, but their hopes to acquire the property were to fail.

Shelley wrote: " We are now embosomed in the solitude of mountains, woods and rivers - silent, solitary, and old: far from any town; six miles from Rhayader, which is the nearest. A ghost haunts this house, which has frequently been seen by the servants."

Their letters show that by the beginning of June 1812 their hopes of acquiring Nantgwyllt had collapsed, and Shelley wrote on 6th June "Nantgwyllt is not ours, nor will it be". On the following day, his wife Harriet was to write "you may imagine our sorrow at leaving so desirable a spot, where every beauty seems centred....“ 

With the ending of their hopes at Nantgwyllt they went to stay for a few days at Cwm Elan, then left the valleys never to return. Shelley was to abandon his young wife after only two years of marriage, and went to live with Mary Godwin. Harriet, desperately unhappy and alone, drowned herself in the Serpentine, a lake in London’s Hyde Park, in 1816.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, by the time of his death an acclaimed lyric poet, was drowned while sailing offshore in Tuscany on July 8th, 1822.