Welsh land for the Welsh nation – the unfinished business of devolution

Peter Ainsworth

In 1965, the village of Capel Celyn was drowned. Liverpool Corporation needed a reservoir. The Welsh community in the valley – Welsh-speaking, rooted, irreplaceable – objected.

Thirty-five of Wales’s thirty-six MPs opposed the bill. It passed anyway, because England had the votes.

Tryweryn became the name for something the Welsh already knew: that when distant institutions make decisions about Welsh land, Welsh communities pay the price.

We are supposed to have moved on. Devolution transferred powers over planning, environment, education, health and language to the Senedd and the Welsh Government.

The principle was simple and unarguable: decisions affecting Welsh life are better made by Welsh institutions accountable to Welsh people. Twenty-five years on, that principle is broadly accepted even by those who once opposed it.

But devolution left something out. It transferred powers. It did not transfer the land.

I live half a mile from Ceibwr Bay on the Pembrokeshire coast – land gifted to the National Trust by Wynford Vaughan Thomas, the Welsh broadcaster and writer, so that it would be held for the benefit of the nation.

Last week, the Trust’s Cambridge solicitors threatened a local Welsh coasteering operator, whose family have been on this coastline for generations, with accusations of trespass, asserting that the Trust owns the headland as a “private landowner” entitled to “restrict use of the land as they see fit.”

The land they are claiming as entirely private is part of the Wales Coast Path – a statutory national trail established by the National Assembly and running, unmistakably, through every inch of the headland in question.

The Trust’s management had not seen the land, not noticed the clear path markings and apparently not even read the map. Their solicitors, when challenged on the Wales Coast Path point, replied that their instructing officer was on holiday.

I wrote formally to the National Trust’s Board of Trustees raising these concerns. The chairman, Rene Olivieri, replied that he was “satisfied the matter is being dealt with appropriately by the local senior leadership team.”

He was satisfied. The people of Wales, whose coastal path his organisation had just attempted to close, were not consulted.

Structural problem

This is a small and vivid illustration of a large and structural problem. The National Trust is an English charity. Its board sits in Swindon. Its senior leadership answers to that board – not to the Senedd, not to the Welsh Government, not to NRW, not to any Welsh democratic institution whatsoever.

It was not created by statute to serve Wales. It has accumulated Welsh land through gift and purchase over more than a century and exercises powers over that land – powers over public access, over commercial activity, over the character of Welsh communities – with no democratic accountability to Wales at all.

It holds some of the most spectacular and culturally significant land in the country on the legal basis that it holds it “for the nation.” But which nation?

That Wynford Vaughan Thomas intended his gift to benefit the Welsh nation does not mean the institution receiving it is fit to honour that intention. Ceibwr demonstrates that it is not.

Consider what else the Trust controls – and ask whether an English elite governing from Swindon is the right custodian of any of it.

Powis Castle is a medieval fortress built by the Welsh Princes of Powys. It was the seat of Welsh sovereign power for centuries. It is now owned and interpreted by an English charity. The princes of Powys deserve better than a footnote in someone else’s national story.

Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant in the Conwy Valley is the birthplace of Bishop William Morgan, who translated the Bible into Welsh in 1588. That translation did not merely provide spiritual sustenance — it standardised the Welsh language at a moment when it faced extinction, and in doing so preserved the linguistic identity of a nation.

It is arguably the most important building in the history of the Welsh language. It is owned by the National Trust.

Penrhyn Castle near Bangor was built on two forms of exploitation: the enslaved labour of Jamaican plantation workers, and the labour of Welsh quarrymen who launched the longest industrial dispute in British history — three years, over 2,800 workers, communities divided, homes bearing the sign Nid oes bradwr yn y tŷ hwn.

That story – of Welsh working-class solidarity and courage against an anglicised aristocratic overlord – is Welsh history. It is currently being told by the institution that owns the overlord’s castle. Welsh hands would tell it as it deserves to be told.

The Dinefwr estate in Carmarthenshire surrounds one of the symbolic centres of the ancient Welsh kingdom of Deheubarth, seat of the Lord Rhys and some of the greatest figures in medieval Welsh history. It too sits substantially in the hands of an English charity.

And then there are the 157 miles of Welsh coastline that the Trust controls – including the headland at Ceibwr, gifted by a Welshman to benefit Wales, now used to threaten trespass proceedings against a Welsh family that has worked the coast for generations.

Transfer

The positive case for transfer is as compelling as the constitutional one. Welsh historic properties in Welsh hands would tell Welsh stories as Welsh stories – not as regional curiosities appended to an English national collection, but as the central chapters of a national narrative that Wales is now, at last, in a position to write for itself.

A Welsh-controlled Tŷ Mawr Wybrnant would place the survival of the Welsh language at the heart of its own heritage. A Welsh-controlled Powis Castle would restore the princes of Powys to their own country’s history. A Welsh-controlled Penrhyn would give the quarrymen’s story the dignity and centrality it has always deserved.

Revenue that currently sustains an English charity would instead benefit Welsh communities and Welsh institutions.

The solution is not complicated. Welsh historic properties held by the National Trust – castles, houses, monuments – should transfer to Cadw, the Welsh Government’s historic environment service, which exists precisely to care for such places in the Welsh public interest.

Welsh countryside and coastal land should transfer to Natural Resources Wales, the statutory body responsible for the Welsh environment, which already manages significant landholdings and has both the expertise and the democratic accountability that the National Trust lacks.

Last week Rhun ap Iorwerth was sworn in as First Minister – the first non-Labour First Minister in the history of devolution, leading the first Welsh nationalist government Wales has ever had.

Something has stirred in the soul of Wales, he said. Plaid Cymru’s manifesto commits to the further devolution of Welsh assets. Here is a specific, achievable and symbolically powerful first act for the new government: open formal negotiations with the National Trust for the transfer of its Welsh properties and landholdings to Cadw and NRW.

English charity

Why does an English charity in Swindon still control some of the finest land in Wales? Why, when it gets things badly wrong, does the chairman simply say he is satisfied?

Why are Welsh stories still being told by an institution with no accountability to the Welsh people?

Tryweryn was the answer to that question last time. Ceibwr is a small but precise reminder that the question has not gone away.

Something has stirred in the soul of Wales. Now is the moment to act on it.

Peter Ainsworth is a policy analyst at the Institute of Economic Affairs, an entrepreneur, a former charity trustee, and an Englishman who has lived in Moylegrove, Pembrokeshire for many years.