In 1930 or thereabouts, Cyril Fox devised an ingenious way to reconstruct the landscapes that Offa’s Dyke had traversed when built (and associated land-uses), by noting how its character changed in different places along its course. The changes he saw are however better ascribed to deliberate design on the one hand and the history of erosion of the monument on the other. This talk will discuss what we can conceive of as post-Roman and pre-Norman Marches landscapes in both land-use and settlement terms. Most of what we can envisage, however, relies upon backwards-projection from 1086 or highly fugitive traces from the surprisingly little archaeological investigation that has so far been undertaken. Potential ways forward rather than established investigative results inevitably therefore take centre-stage.

Professor Keith Ray is a Senior Research Fellow at Cardiff University. He is working as part of the team delivering the Leverhulme Trust funded research project ‘Making the March: Contesting Lands in the Early Medieval Frontier.’ This three-year multidisciplinary project (in a partnership between Cardiff and Manchester Universities) began in January 2024 and aims to gain a better understanding of the dynamics of (and tensions within) the border zone between ‘England’ and ‘Wales’ between the fifth and eleventh centuries CE. Keith was the lead author of the book Offa’s Dyke: Landscape and Hegemony in Eighth Century Britain, published by Windgather Press (Oxford) in 2016. He is also a co-Convener of the Offa’s Dyke Collaboratory and is on the Editorial Board of the Offa’s Dyke Journal. In 2021 he designed the new permanent exhibition (entitled ‘Offa’s Dyke: A Window on Early Medieval Britain’) at the Offa’s Dyke Centre, Knighton. In 2023 he completed a 220-mile long 23-day walk from Sedbury (Gloucestershire) overlooking the Severn Estuary near Chepstow to GronantBeach (Flintshire). The route only followed the Offa’s dyke Psth for some 40% of its route and passed through – among other places – Ross-on-Wye, Hereford, Knighton, the Clun valley, the Vale of Montgomery, Forden opposite Welshpool, Llanymynech, Trefonen, Selattyn, Chirk Park, Brymbo, Treuddyn, Nercwys (Mold) and Rhydymwyn.

The Norman impact on the Welsh Marches was felt even before 1066. When Edward the Confessor returned from exile to become king of England in 1041, he brought with him a number of Norman knights, some of whom he located in the unsettled Welsh Marches, where it is believed that they built castles. Following the Norman Conquest the region was badly affected by the violent response of William the Conqueror to the uprisings that occurred up to 1070 in various parts of England, including the Marches. Eventually the region was divided into three semi-autonomous earldoms. In this presentation I will concentrate on the activities of Roger de Montgomery, Earl of Shrewsbury (c.1070-1094) and the means by which he took over Shropshire and used his earldom as a base for territorial gain in Wales.

Dr Trevor Rowley MA., MLitt., FSA., Emeritus Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford is the former Deputy Director, Department for Continuing Education at Oxford University. Author of many books on landscape history and the Normans. His most recent book is Landscapes of the Norman Conquest (Pen and Sword, 2022). He is currently working on a new version of his 1972 book, The Shropshire Landscape (Hodder and Stoughton).

Monastic Houses of the Welsh Marches and their Landscapes

The sites chosen for the foundation of monastic houses were not random but informed by multiple factors often linked to the creation or perpetuation of landscapes: environmental, political, or cultural. Even the Cistercians who professed to seek ‘the desert’ entered into inhabited landscapes, charged with meaning and significance. Once founded, a monastery might transform its physical landscape through economic activities, or create new, metaphorical landscapes of network and power. This talk will consider monasteries of the March in both these contexts.

Professor Janet Burton is Professor Emerita at University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where she continues to supervise research students and teach on the MA in Medieval Studies. She and Dr Karen Stöber are the directors of the Monastic Wales project and general editors of the journal Medieval Monastic Studies (published by Brepols). She has published extensively on many aspects of monastic history.

From greenwood glades harbouring beastly outlaws to Welsh forest passes exploited by rebellious lords to seas that shelter castaway exiles, literary texts from the medieval Welsh Marches imagine worlds full of vibrant land- and seascapes. Ranging across texts in Latin, English, and French, this paper focusses on the works copied and rewritten by the so-called ‘Harley scribe’, an elusive figure active in and around Ludlow in the first half of the fourteenth century. In texts such as the Song of Trailbaston, Fouke le Fitz Waryn, and Kyng Horn, land- and seascapes are no mere backdrop to the main action; rather, they act on their narrative worlds in politically meaningful ways, often colluding with the heroes in their resistance to unjust foes. Situating these texts in their manuscript contexts, we will explore the agential environments that they imagine and consider further what it means for such texts to elaborate political ecologies that include, but are by no means limited to, the human.

Dr Matt Lampitt is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Bristol, working on ‘Mapping the March’. Matt gained his PhD in 2019 from the Department of French at King’s College London, after which he held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge, from 2019–2023. His monograph, Literary Culture in the Medieval Welsh Marches: Networks, Places, Politics, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2024.

Ancient polities always leave their mark in ghostly shapes and residual identities. In researching my recent book All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the places between, it became increasingly obvious as I explored the borderland quite how much the Marcher identity survived still, five hundred years after its official abolition. Even as someone from Worcestershire, who has lived in Powys for the past twenty years, the extent and magnitude of this survival surprised me greatly.

My talk will flesh this discovery out, looking at the patterns of settlement, belonging, identity and culture from the years of the Marcher lordships that can still be discerned today. The talk will be fully illustrated with maps and images, including many of the photographs taken on my research trips.

Mike Parker has written numerous books. These always take his sense of place as their starting point, but mix in memoir, history, identity, politics and belonging. They include the bestselling Map Addict, republished in a new edition last year, its critically-acclaimed follow-up The Wild Rover and the cult Neighbours From Hell? Another bestseller was his Mapping the Roads, a lavishly illustrated history of our roads and their mapping, going back to Roman times and earlier. Mike has also written and presented numerous TV and radio series. These included On the Map for Radio 4, and for ITV Wales, Coast to Coast and the ever-popular Great Welsh Roads, when he toured the country in a campervan, with his dog Patsy. For the past seven years, he has been working on a loose trilogy. Two books have so far been published: On the Red Hill (2019), an evocation of the queer rural, won the 2020 non-fiction Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted and Highly Commended for the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing. Following it in spring 2023 was All the Wide Border, an examination of the England-Wales frontier as a line on the map, a line through history and a line in our heads. Discussing it on Times Radio, Ayesha Hazarika said “No-one maps the secrets of the UK quite like Mike Parker.” It was named by Waterstones as one of the ten best travel books of the year. www.mikeparker.org.uk

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