A new book reveals a five-year community archaeology quest to date some of the oldest houses in Britain - and some of the surprising results

© Philip Halling, geograph.org.uk

© Nancy via Wikimedia Commons

Discovering the Historic Houses of Snowdonia - a large-format book of 295 pages with 225 high-quality illustrations - is published on Friday (December 5 2014), priced £29.95. Pre-order online. Book launch takes place on December 4 at Plas Tan-y-Bwlch. Richard Suggett will be speaking about the book at the Royal Commission, Aberystwyth on December 5. Contact the Commission on 01970 621200 or email nmr.wales@rcahmw.gov.uk for more details.

Snowdonia is renowned for its ancient monuments and houses, set against streams and mountains and adored by residents and visitors.A scheme to date some of them, launched five years ago in a plan which gathered momentum as it unravelled more and more of the landscape’s history, began with the informed assumption that most of the signs of building work left behind would come from the 17th century.So a farmer’s house which turned out to have foundations as far back as 1518 was a shock.“To our complete surprise, we found out that the earliest storeyed houses in Snowdonia are among the earliest in Britain,” explains Richard Suggett.“Snowdonia is seen as kind of remote and the houses relatively late on that western fringe.“We expected 1550 at the earliest. We knew there were a sprinkling of pre-1600 houses but we really thought they were generally from 1600 and afterwards. But many of them come in from 1520 onwards.“And that, you know, really is extraordinary.”Suggett is the author of a new book relaying the quest to discover these original grand designs – for five years, packed meetings, skilful archival work and a “quite classic” exercise in community archaeology and fundraising has seen hundreds of members of the public investigate around 100 attractions.“We’ve been slowly working from the border with Shropshire, going west and building up the chronologies,” he says.“We’ve reached a stage where we can date almost anything now. Ideally you need a lot of timber. And if you’ve got complete sapwood right to the bark edge then you can tell the exact year it was felled.”One of them is Wybrnant, where one Bishop William Morgan once lived.“He’s famous as the translator of the whole bible into Welsh. It’s rather like"We tree ring dated it, a bit in trepidation. But actually it turned out to be dated 1565, which was the year that he went to Cambridge, so obviously the family had struck a good patch, rebuilt their house and sent him off to Cambridge.”Now owned by the National Trust, this is a “big-ish, three-unit farmhouse”, according to Suggett.“But buried in the walls are the remains of these crucks. Rather unusually, you can see that this house had a cruck-framed late medieval predecessor."It’s very interesting to see the process: one permanent house has replaced another except for the stubs of the crucks.”It’s symbolic of a widespread overhaul. “There was a real move to clear away the old stock of cruck-framed houses and build nice new storeyed houses and fireplaces.“Sometime between 1500 and about 1550, the peasant farmers replaced their houses with this new wave of small-scale gentry houses.“They almost completely rebuilt the housing stock between 1520 and, say, 1620. Snowdonia has got a very distinctive, storeyed house plan.“They’re half the size but they’re on the same plan. The houses are just so distinctive.“They have these big end chimneys and these nice, heated first floor chambers. They’re completely different from a medieval hall house.“Year after year you get these new houses being built.”Most of them turned out to have arrived during the 1530s and 1540s, although archaeologists expect to find examples from the 1520s, possibly inspired by a looming, towerhouse-style building.“The house had so much prestige that it was imitated by other local gentry houses,” believes Suggett.“We haven’t dated them all by any means and I’m sure we’ll find others from that date eventually.“You tend to think of the trend towards storeyed houses as something that happens in southern England but I think that the Snowdonia houses show that it was a much more general phenomenon.“The rebuilding was absolutely comprehensive.”The team’s excitement and confidence owes much to the accuracy of their technique. Date inscriptions on a few of the houses, added after 1570, have helped.“Occasionally we’ve been able to test it against the date inscription and, sure enough, the timber was felled a year or two before the date,” enthuses Suggett.“You get a core about the size of a pencil from the roof.” In the book, readers can see the sample point marked with a red target.“It’s accurate to the season, that’s what’s so amazing. It answers, at last, that question – how old is the house?”