By Maredudd ap Huw
Had circumstances been different, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), the Sussex-born English lyric poet, could have become a permanent resident of Wales.
Shelley’s cousin, Thomas Grove, owned Cwm Elan, one of the great estates and mansions of mid-Wales. The 18-year old poet fell in love with the area whilst staying with Grove in 1811, before his marriage to Harriet Westbrook. Shelley and his young bride travelled to mid-Wales in April 1812, resolving to establish their marital home in Wales. They set their hearts on Nantgwyllt House in the valley of the river Claerwen, just over a mile from Cwm Elan, and having moved into the property, attempted to raise the funds to purchase the house.
At the National Library of Wales is a letter from Shelley, written at Nantgwyllt on 2 June 1812, and addressed to his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley of Horsham, Sussex. It reflects the poet’s anxious desperation to learn what money was due to him on his coming of age, as ‘I am now about to take the place whence I date this letter.’
Alas, a few days later, Shelley’s hopes were dashed: he failed to buy Nantgwyllt, and both he and his wife left the house, never to return.
Now, on the eve of the 200th anniversary of the poet’s death (8 July), it is poignant to note how fate consigned all protagonists in the story to watery graves: the pregnant Harriet Shelley, having being abandoned by her husband, drowned herself in London’s Hyde Park on 10 December 1816. Shelley himself drowned in an accidental sinking of a boat off the coast of Italy on 8 July 1822. And what of the mid-Wales mansions? At the beginning of the 20th century both houses were submerged in reservoirs providing a supply of water for Birmingham: Cwm Elan under the Carreg Ddu reservoir and Nantgwyllt under the waters of Caban Coch.
