 yng Nghymru, yng Nghymru, ac yng Nghymru. While we're waiting for this to sharpen up, I'll just give a brief introduction. I'm very honoured to have been admitted as a fellow of the society this afternoon, and to have been asked to deliver a lecture. My talk will fall into two parts. First, I will give description and outline of the various aspects of this project, and then I will trace the development of domestic buildings in castle towns and the countryside of north-west Wales. And in conclusion, I will indicate the key findings of the project and its legacy. First of all, don't be alarmed, but you'll notice that the title is bilingual. This is because in north-west Wales, the majority of people are first language Welsh speakers, that I shall be speaking in English this afternoon, although sometimes I do give talks in Welsh. Second thing to note is that we have two titles. We started the project with the title, The North-West Wales Centrochronology Project. It seemed fitting as we were going for grants for the scientific aspect of the project. But as we realised that we were going to be working with communities up and down north-west Wales, it really wasn't the right title. So we quickly adopted dating old Welsh houses as a far more understandable title. And we are extremely grateful to this society for grants received each of those three years towards the scientific aspects of the project. Now that I am not a professional dendrochronologist, nor a professional architectural historian, nor professional anything in this field really, is a serious amateur of history and archaeology in north-west Wales over the last 20 or 30 years. Technology is defeating me. We need to be talking about stonewalled, slave-roofed houses. They came much later. And in north-west Wales, as in most of the United Kingdom, the earliest surviving houses are timber framed. The other wing of an undatable hall house is situated in Balmaris on the Isle of Anglesey. And the timbers in this solar dated to the 1480s. Discover, sample and date using dendrochronology, original timber that is suitable for this technology from houses of the pre-1600s period. Remember the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory team working in a house in the Vale of Clwyd. A crook timber, all the work we did has been in oak. And here he is using a steel hollow drill to extract. We will come back to a picture of the exterior of this house that the timber was dated to 1500 and one. Now that's the felling date. Because timber was used un-seasoned. I don't know if you're going to try to knock an ale into a very seasoned piece of oak. It's not easy. Fact is almost impossible. And because these timbers once needed to be fitted with mortise and tenon joints and holes or pegs and so on, they were used un-seasoned and gathered and used to erect the building within a year or two of the felling date. So I will be giving you felling dates. The same was to record the architecture particularly of the woodwork. We hoped we might come across schools of master carpenters moving across north Wales or examples of different particular styles in either geographical areas or across time. We haven't yet had the time to analyse all the results to work out whether we have come up with that sort of data. We have on the left Richard Sogert from the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales with whom the project was in partnership. He is a senior investigator of historic buildings and has been extremely helpful. On the right is Dr Dan Miles from the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratories who were awarded the contract for all the dendrochronology. The work of doing the building recording was awarded to about four different regionally acknowledged experts in building recording. So, again, it brought some jobs to the area. This is the outside cover of one of the reports on a house dated to 1537 in the area near Vitus Efoid. These reports as well as containing a lot of text and photographs had plans and elevations. This is of a remote farm at the first phase dated to 1520s. We record the history of the houses. This was mainly done through the history of the people who lived within those houses, owners and tenants. We gave innumerable talks to societies across north Wales about three years ago. Gathering support, there were notices in libraries, things in the media and so on. We had a lot of interest. We ran about half a dozen introductory days in local archives in which volunteers came to hear about the project in detail and what might be asked of them. Here in the afternoon session, we have one of the local archivists and education officer for Gwynedd showing the group some of the documents. In this case, it's a half tax. What original documents they could look at to see if they can track down the information about the early period of the house they had chosen to study. These groups in six areas met every month. In fact, one group split into two groups, so we had eight groups meeting every month across north Wales. Here's one happy band. About half of these are First Language Welsh speakers and they could choose which language they used to do their research and to write up their report. I was personally quite glad that most of them decided to write them up in English. These monthly meetings were for mutual support, for education into more ways in which they might find house, history, details and also just a general jollying along and encouragement. But they've been about activism group in all the areas. Our theme was to share the results. I suppose that's partly what I'm doing this afternoon. Here is a group in New St Assif towards the beginning of the period when I'm still looking for new volunteers. A cheerful band of archaeologists in the hope. I don't think practising looking at them, but never the mind. This was last spring a binding board conference on heritage in north Wales and we had an hour slot to talk about the project there. Here we have a proud owner showing a group of volunteers features in his house which was mainly of the 16th and early 17th century. Why was the project necessary? I used to show another picture of this house but in the snow about 18 months ago the roof fell in. It's a listed building but it hasn't done it much good has it? So one of the aims has been to record and where possible date these old houses that look as though they're on the last legs. So that there are recordings of poor posterity. Another reason has been because we genuinely wanted to increase the database of knowledge and understanding about the development of vernacular architecture in north Wales. And we hope to pass this on to planning officers so they will have better information from which to make decisions about modernisation requests. All houses have been modernised over the centuries but some ways are more appropriate than others. How do we do this work? While many of you will recall from nature study at least if not from nature experience that you can easily see the annual growth rings on the cross section of the piece of timber. And that the width of that tree ring varies according to the nutrients, water, shelter. The various things that will help the tree grow better or just struggle to survive. That's a small joist in the ceiling. All you can say about the date of the timber fell that's this size is that it must have been felled after that particular annual growth ring. Therefore it's a date after which the tree that was felled a terminus post-quen date. If you're using a larger piece of timber for sampling and you're into the south wood you then have a felling date range usually about 30 years. If you're fortunate probably up in the roof you've found a much larger timber perhaps with bark edge then you may well get a precise felling date. Sometimes because of the variation in the molecular structure through the seasons of the year you're able to give a season as well. And not unsurprisingly we found that a considerable number of the timbers dated were felled in the winter. Which makes perfect sense the trees have lost their leaves and the rural community has a little more time for this sort of activity. However we were saddened to find there were a large number of lovely timbers we were not able to date. They were mainly low lying maritime situations where the trees had just grown so well so fast that the annual growth rings were wide and there were an insufficient number of them within the pieces of wood that we had. And so we couldn't match up this variation of facts and things in the annual growth rings which are a bit like the information you get when you go into a supermarket, the barcode and that is then matched against the regional database. We couldn't do it because we didn't have a unique signature so that was a great disadvantage. In other cases it might have been because the woodlands had been managed and trees had been pollarded or other things had been done so when we were not getting a true reading. Here at the top we have a rejected sample that's why I got it that was no good. But no it is a longer sample that has been split, polished and would have been measured to 100 mm and the data fed into the computer so that hopefully out pops the filling date. This particular piece is the central part here. The acorn fell into the ground in 1407 and the tree was felled in the spring of 1576. Here is a tree at timber being sampled and the skill, one of the many skills is to go diagonally what goes from the bark through to the centre of the heartwood of the tree. At this house the timbers were felled in the 1560s. Where did this take place? Only really in those parts of North West Wales where there were community groups willing to help with the research side of it. Where we could find volunteers to do the house histories. So these were several parts of Anglesey. Those parts of Gwynedd fold Ardduron and Dwiwrn. We had a specific grant from the Heem Peninsula and another from Arddurdwy which used formally to be part of Marionyshire. In Denbyshire we worked in the area called Adenion which previously again had been in Marionyshire and we worked in Conwy. We raised about £150,000 in grants, a large heritage lottery grant and then the £13,600 was the total of the tree grants received from this society so we were extremely grateful. And then another two dozen grants which as those of you who have been involved in this sort of thing will know that means that I applied for at least another two dozen. It's quite a job isn't it getting money. We were able to count as cash equivalent or match funding, the time spent by volunteers, the use of partners facilities and the free use of partners expertise. And that probably were made at least another £170 perhaps £120,000. So one could say that this project has spent the equivalent of over a quarter of a million pounds. We worked in close partnership with various organisations particularly the Royal Commission on Ancient Historic Monuments of Wales based in Aberystwyth whom I've already mentioned. And in fact they wish to write a book with us on the results and their implications. We worked closely with the National Trust on their old farmhouses, not the greater buildings but on their old farmhouses in North West Wales. Cynull is the regional equivalent of the local authority schools advisory service and we work with their humanities and IT officers and have produced an interactive bilingual learning resource for PS2 primary school children when they do the topic Tudor homes and houses. And then I mentioned that in the clean area there was a large landscape partnership scheme of which we became a smallish centre of chronology until about 2004 when I went to a VAG lecture. I heard about this marvellous technique which was able to bridge the gap formed by opinions from architectural historians who had organised houses into consecutive orders of styles but could not tell you if a particular house was the first or the last of that style to be erected. And that could be 150 years difference in time and chronology can help. I also noticed that there were very few houses in North West Wales that had been dated, very few in this area. So I raised a separate £20,000, £25,000 and we went round and got permission and dated the ones that have got a reddish blob. Really centring on Snowden which is about here. These are mainly houses in remote and quite high areas and we were able to date almost all of those. That wetted my appetite but I thought we need more because we were not doing building recording. We were not really recording the architect partly because most of those houses were situated in the old Cynarventure and the World Commission had done a very detailed inventory of Cynarventure in the 1950s so there were plans of most of those buildings. So a summary of the two projects together I visited well over 300 houses and it has been amazing how welcoming the owners or tenants have been. Very often I've called on announced, usually started in Welsh if I thought it was probably Welsh people there but then had to switch back to English to explain. I should think I've had under a dozen who would have virtually shut the door in my face and said we know it's an old house but we don't want anyone else to come. We're not interested in its history goodbye. So people generally are fascinated by the history of their own houses. Then along come the Occidentro team and cut down the houses I think might be interesting to do by carefully assessing which ones are likely to date. So in the end they dated well 94 to 100 and had those 75 yielded dates. Five dated to before 1500. We had a number of hall houses both croc framed and straight truss sitting on the top of the stone wall. We had many timber wall houses, timber framed houses which we hadn't expected as well as the stone wall houses. We found a brand new style, a transitional style. We found two houses in the 1530s that were half lofted halfway between a wall house and a fully storied house and I will show you pictures of those in the little one. Then we found as we'd expected masses of the storied stone wall houses but we realised that the earliest ones had a ladder to get upstairs whereas the later ones had a spiral stone staircase in the gable end wall on the old stair. We had well over 200 volunteers. 70 of those are still actively researching and doing further work. We must have had over 30 on the range of committees dealing with the educational side, the IT, publications, the media, all the things that you have to do. We had a tremendous amount of support. We're going to move on to talk a bit about houses in north west Wales having talked a bit about the process of the project. Cull homestead in hilly rural north west Wales possibly from the 7th, 8th, 9th century through to the 1400s. Subrectangular buildings, gable end into the hills. We've always had a problem with rain in north Wales. Stone footings, timber superstructure, organic roof. This is the dwelling house. We know that because the artist here has put a hole in the roof and there's plenty of smoke coming out. I dare say there's an awful lot left inside as well. So that is your typical farmstead. And those of you who are or were hill walkers will have seen many, many of the subrectangular banks of stone. The circular ones are earlier and you're seeing stone footings of both domestic and offshore buildings. Wales into Shropshire for this, up to magma cottage. But we still have stone footing, timber superstructure here with the timber framing and an organic roof. Now this is the modern bit. This is from the 1400s. Inside there's a pair that are from the 13th century, 1269. Now that's almost a couple of decades before the Anglo-Norman invasion of Wales. And there is nothing like this in Wales at all. But we keep hoping we're going to find something really early. This is an interesting mound of stones now really in a bracken covered field. Excavated about 60 years ago therefore not in the same way that it would have been done had it been done more recently. But it's a subrectangular house. The layout was on the floor. You have opposite doorways, you have a service wing. So the high table would have been up here. Now we happen to know from documentation that this house was lived in in the late 1300s by an important family, one of the highest status families of this particular area. And we also know that the house was burnt down during the Ewinglindor uprising, revolt, rebellion, depending on which side you were on, around 1402. So we know that there were magnificent houses. We have the bards writing about them with ornate timber work, but none of them survive any longer. Now I'm jumping to the castle towns of North Wales. Edward comes in at the end of the 13th century and quickly builds substantial stone castles. And walled towns. And if you didn't know, you'd probably think this was a picture of Ludlow, or Schroesbury, or somewhere like this. But it's conwy in what one now thinks of as stone-built north Wales. They'd drawn about 1800. And the building on the left here is National Trust property. Formally, I guess it would have been a merchant's house, a merchant's townhouse. And the dendro there gives a date of 1420. So pretty soon after the end of the Ewinglindor uprising, when rumour has it that virtually everybody burnt the other side's houses down. And anyway, following the plague and the famines of the previous century, they would be in a pretty poor condition. Houses then started being erected in the 1430s, 20s, and that's a period in the towns. So there we have conwy. Moving on to Bormarys. Here's Bormarys Castle. Our work called 95 Castle Street junction with Church Street. And most of the houses along here on both sides have the remnants of medieval buildings in them. If you walk into Neptune cafe and ask for ships, you are actually facing a Wathlundor wall. But that wasn't any good for dating. Here we have the 1480s solar of this warm house. And here we have an amazing building. Just looking at it from the other angle, this turned out to be the oldest house that we found. It's a first floor hall. Quite likely downstairs was a stone built as the house in Conwy. And the timbers up here were felled in 1483. A couple of years between Vittor Bosworth, about which we're hearing quite a bit these days. So that was an amazing find. Really only discovered when the current owners moved in and wanted to do some substantial alterations. Here behind we have another important building. For Davies in his book, Homes and Hearts of the Welsh House, a drawing of it as it would have been a little later. But the first part that we dated was here and that dated to the 1540s. It does have wall paintings upstairs. I don't know what we were thinking about, but we didn't notice this little house for quite a while. And in the end, when we did, it was absolutely obvious that it was situated on a mortgage plot going away from the main street. Timbers inside came out at two dates. It's either a 1490s house with a 1515 extension at the back, or it's a 1515 house using some old timbers. Not quite sure which. But having seen that shape, when we were looking in Canarybone in the war town there, it was very obvious that here is another gable end on a mortgage plot. As we go inside this house, we find timbers that were actually found in the winter of 1516-17. Now we dated this in two phases. First of all, we were allowed upstairs and they all looked at 1516-17. And the owner who eventually let us up downstairs, we gave some more, Martin did these, didn't you? And again, it was the winter of 1567. So all the timbers were gathered that winter and the house erected. Now we nearly didn't have the opportunity to look in this house because about 20 years ago, it was in a very poor condition and the council bought it and were about to pull it down before backwards. Now why am I showing you these two roti senes? Because if you were to go in there, you had the smoke blackened timbers of a medieval whorehouse. The wind brace here is cusp, which is a signified high status building. But unfortunately, being on the coast, the timbers were too fast going to be dated. But from the style, it would seem to be very early 1500s. Coming into the rural countryside, in fact, I've moved away from north Wales. I'm in Radnyshire because it's a good example of what I want to mention next. Again, we have the stone footing, the timber superstructure, and probably here, a wooden shingles roof, or a scratched door from the lot in the north. We have a two bay hall. Now far would have been on the floor there and the high table here and the bench behind with the family and guests seated there. People from the community would come in, one of these doors, even a child knew to go in on the non-windy, non-wet side, and would turn into the hall and would see the amazing carpentry up here above the collar. There would be business, there would be legal disputes sorted out here because these were the houses of the gentry. These were not present houses. They were not even the middling farmer type. These were houses of the gentry. They were the most important type of house, and you might not even have one of these in each parish. After business has been conducted, then family and the visitors would go through into the solar, the parlour, and up a ladder. There would be a bedchamber. The other end, you've got the area for storage, food preparation, and all the jobs that happen. This is the sort of pattern we've been looking at and finding, but of course the fact that 99% of them had been altered and they've got ceilings in awkward places and you can't take pictures like that. This is a hall house now in St Pagans at the National History Museum of Wales. Stone footings, timber framed, timber molly and window, glass to expensive organic roof. We have the smoke blackened 1801 house, also in the vein of Clwyd, only about 5 or 10 miles from the previous one, which is now in St Pagans, but here it is in its original spot, and this is the one where you saw the young man grilling right at the beginning. A few or two later, we have a chimney in the building. So this is 1501. A part of Snowdonia is very close. Another croc frame building, half on the floor, built under the prime Henry VIII, was still a slim young man. The fireplace and chimney were inserted. You would then walk in, come round and face a large Engelwch fireplace. So from 1508, this was the farm here, and amazingly in this instance we could trace documentary evidence back to 1508 for the ownership and tenancy and all sorts of information about this particular upland sheep farm. Then around 1920, a new house was built. This is no longer needed as the farm house. Building with lovely timbers here, fitted large fireplace, centrally inserted, and a spiral staircase. Name building, near Blaenau Pestineol, a large sub rectangular building, and the fireplace now taking the place where the floor originally. We weren't able to date as much as we'd like. So we've not found us at all that much yet. At the heart of Snowdonia, near Aberglaslen Pass, if you know the area near Bedgallot, is this hall house dated to 1529. Again, it's a two bay hall house, fire on the floor. Remember these are not peasants, these are the gentry of the day here at their table. Probably the richest people in the parish. And here you have the doorway through into their solar, their private quarters, and a ladder to get them up. Here indeed is that doorway. 1529. Now just to show that people can make mistakes very easily, all the books, very early books say, well it's obvious, this is a confessional into a Roman Catholic church. Therefore this must be a church. Because they were not used back in the 1860s, at least not in north-west Wales, to knowing what maybe houses really looked like. There was suddenly enough money through all this building. Well it was two things. It was you folk down in London, and it was cows. Because as the cows of the Midlands and the south-east were growing rapidly, particularly in Elizabethan times, they had to be fed. And so the drovers walked the cattle from the mountains because they, marvellous creatures that they are, can turn this almost inedible looking stuff into lovely chunks of meat. So it was the cattle trade coming to London and the drovers seeing all these new designs and new buildings and everything that was happening, taking the money back, not in gold of course, it would have been too dangerous, but at the beginning of the banks, as IOU notes, that for the first time for a couple of centuries, the people back in Wales had more money than they needed for subsystems. And therefore it seemed to be the right time to be building and rebuilding houses. This is one of these transitional houses. Timber felled in 1532. The house is almost a thousand feet above sea level, again near the line of Estinioog. And you will notice that it has two downstairs windows, but only one upstairs. In ground plan you have the opposite doorways and then to one side you have the preparation service storage rooms. But to the other side you have a large room with a chimney. This is solar gone. So the private chamber, the bed chamber has moved upstairs. So there is a staircase along the side of the wall. You go upstairs, hence you only need the window in that part of the building. The other one built a year later and about 15 miles away. And we know actually that a droblers family were associated with this building. A magnificent crook house here on the going restoration. Parker Hildred, an incredible artist whose work has just been purchased by the World Commission for Safekeeping. Not our bits of work, but all the work he's done over the last few decades on particularly industrial scenes. Before places were closed and stuff removed, marvellous work anyway. He has done this work for us. So you still have your opposite doorways. You still have your two doorways into your service area. And this one was probably downstairs to go upstairs to the private area. May have had a heart on the floor to start with. Now it has a huge Inglewood fireplace behind us. So 1533. A roundabout the same period or within five or ten years a brand new style has appeared. Stone walled, two storage completely. You have the opposite doorways, kitchen storage and you have a large Inglewood fireplace. You go up the ladder into the servants of the children's bedroom, walk through into the privacy of your bedroom, but that is above the cold storage area that's cold. So you have your own fireplace for a building just outside Canardvon and here it is re-erected at St Fagans. Here we're seeing it from the other end where we have the jetted out, the cobbling for the upstairs doesn't mind what shape the chimney is. This is pure, nor the height. A larger window where you have the downstairs large path is because you need the light to see what you're doing and a larger window in the sheet bedchamber. You have a fan of Bruce Swire here with stones over the main door although some have a one large stove a cyclopean lintwell there. A date range building dated some time ago to the 15 porches just taken down the stones numbered and it was reassembled at St Fagans. But this project dates earlier and on the Bruce Swire that stones over what was the original doorway. Seated by this door. A large window is a replacement but if you go up into the roof space smoke went up the chimney and therefore the upstairs rooms were smoke free at the beginning of much more privacy. The people who entertained the barns reconstruction drawings you can see both it probably became the door with the issues of mothers-in-law. Other of these types of houses have been called the Snowdonia style. Ignore these door windows probably a large Peter Smith houses of the Welsh countryside first published in 1975 when Dundro racing hadn't really been done anywhere. You have opposite doorways and you've got the larger window here so you're going to have the large Inglnwch bar walked in you then to be able to do this. So I think myself it's very unlikely that many priests hidden these is the foreblown house. It's another one. This is the one from which that sample that core was taken and this is dated to 1579 for this rear window in the main room was no longer needed or wanted and so it was blocked. And when they took away the dry stone blocking they found the diagonal most one was dated to the winter of 1552-53. So you never picked up the Welsh I don't panic just turn it around. One is about the project in case you're interested in what we're doing now in the last Easter and now has about a hundred members. We undertake research, we visit old houses the quarterly newsletter let everybody know what's happening and we do lectures and study tours. Next week we're going to south Wales to St Fagans and Cosmuston in many ill villages. Interactive learning resources are out in all the schools in north west Wales and that's really important I think because linked with visits to some of these houses that will help the youngsters put some reality into what sometimes mentioned the world commission want to write a book with us on the process, the results and the implication the last 12 months. I believe that's good how many because we've got the word dating our goal there's lots of interest and we're planning to put the dendroponology reports building recording reports of all these 70-80 houses onto the website within the next. North west Wales was no architectural but in fact was to the forefront of innovative building Chechnya Elizabethan period.