The documentation and conservation of an ‘Historic landscape’: the Man-Moel district of South Wales

Abstract

ABSTRACT The landscape of the area around Man-moel in the western valleys of Gwent is a remarkable survival from the pre-industrial landscape of south Wales. Documentary evidence suggests an early Christian monastic foundation there may have been followed by a hamlet, part of the Marcher manor of Machen. This may have shrunk or even been deserted during the crisis of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and the church had disappeared by the sixteenth century. Meanwhile, land to the south had been given to the Cistercian abbey of Llantarnam, possibly as a bulwark against further Norman expansion. Settlement in this southern area expanded again from the sixteenth century until the agricultural depression of the 1870s. The whole area is now the focus for a landscape reconstruction project which raises important questions about the perception, interpretation and management of ‘historic landscapes’.