Historical background
An area that is known to have been agriculturally productive in the Medieval period (as reflected in documentary evidence and in the evidence of the place name Llaethdy (dairy), and which benefited from income derived from mining in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Key historic landscape characteristics
Improved agriculture
A small area on the periphery of the main settlement areas and of the mines, though effectively part of a much larger landscape of agricultural improvement that extends out of the Historic Landscape area. The farm houses and outbuildings mainly lie outside the Register area; only Llaethdy Mawr and Pentre Gwian lie within, the former a very substantial farm house, the latter a much smaller double-fronted two storey dwelling, but both of nineteenth century date. There is a cottage row at Mynydd Llwyd in which traditional character has been effaced, and a vernacular isolated dwelling at Tal y Dyffryn (SH 44799108).
The area is characterised by large regular enclosures representing improvements of the eighteenth and nineteenth century under the patronage of the major landowners, and reflecting not only the quality of the land itself but the increased prosperity of farming in the area after mining began on a major scale in the 1770s.
