Dolgellau

A crossing, a parliament, a wool town, a music hall

Dolgellau grew up where a road meets a river below a mountain. Everything it later became — county town, wool trade, Quaker exodus, folk-music centre — grew from that same crossing.

1. A crossing before it was a town

   Dolgellau grew up around the point where the road from the coast meets the road into the mountains, on the River Wnion below Cadair Idris. It became the county town of Merionethshire, and stayed so until the county was abolished in 1974: a status now visible only in the density of its own listed buildings, more than any other town in Wales.

2. A parliament, by tradition

   Local tradition holds that Owain Glyndŵr assembled the last Welsh Parliament of 1404 here, in a building later known as Parliament House. That building was taken down and rebuilt in Newtown in 1886, and no source checked here fixes its original site with certainty, so the town keeps the story more securely than the stones.

3. The wool town

   Through the 18th century Dolgellau grew rich on Welsh flannel: by 1800 the trade was reckoned worth £50,000 to £100,000 a year, carried out to Barmouth for shipping or over to Bala and on to Shrewsbury. Factories went up in the town and the valleys around it from 1801, and the trade declined through the 19th century as mechanised mills elsewhere took the business.

4. Quakers, and a farm’s name in Pennsylvania

   George Fox preached in Dolgellau in 1657, and enough of the town was convinced that a group left for Pennsylvania in 1686, led by Rowland Ellis of Bryn Mawr, a farm in the hills south of the town. Ellis’s farm gave its name to the Pennsylvania town — and the women’s college — still called Bryn Mawr today.

5. From market hall to music hall

   The market hall on Eldon Square went up in 1870, and spent a century as exactly that: plus a grain store, a cinema, and a dance hall along the way. In 2007 it reopened as Tý Siamas, the National Centre for Welsh Folk Music, named for an 18th-century harpist who played for a queen.