Research

Discovering Old Welsh Houses studies and celebrates the traditional houses of North Wales built between the 1400s and the mid 1700s and the lives of the people who lived in them. We provide help and guidance to our members to carry out research, and we publish three types of reports (house histories, historic building surveys and tree-ring dating reports) and a variety of booklets. We support volunteers to design and develop projects and offer help to owners to find out more about the history of their houses.

House Histories

We encourage and help members research and write up the histories of houses that were built before the mid-1700s, pre-dating the widespread use of mass-produced materials and when there was still considerable distinctive local variation in plan form and decoration.

Initially, this involves researching the Internet and then moving on to local libraries, regional archives and national libraries. There is no cut-off date for the house histories, many of which take the story down to the present day.

Tree ring dating

We raise money from public and private sources to fund targeted tree-ring dating (dendrochronology) programmes.

This highly technical work is carried out by professional laboratories and entails drilling in-situ oak timber and removing small cores to compare with standard control chronologies – sounds simple but it’s a challenging and fast-developing science! Buildings were normally erected within a year or two of felling.

Unfortunately, for various reasons not all timber is suitable for this procedure. Some houses were built using ‘fast grown’ timber with insufficient tree rings. But scientific dating technologies are developing all the time, and we will take advantage of breakthroughs as they come on stream. To date we have tree-ring dated over 100 houses.

Architectural Recording

We commission architectural surveys of houses of exceptional interest. This involves making detailed measured plans, sections and a full photographic record. Normally these are undertaken by professional investigators, but we do provide some training in the basics of making an historic building recording and intend to develop this in the years ahead. To date we have recorded over 70 houses.

Reports

Booklets

Our members produce a variety of booklets that follow a different format to the standard reports, for instance on the history of houses built after 1700, histories of estates and research carried out by our members on different types of buildings such as schools and farm buildings.

Booklets