The auction was scheduled for the morning of October 11, 1894, at the offices of Williams and Sons, land agents, in Aberystwyth. Lot 1 was the Cwm Elan estate, comprising approximately 281,000 acres of upland in the counties of Cardiganshire and Radnorshire, including some 47,000 acres of old hardwood and mixed forest in the upper valleys.
The bidder of record was the Mersey Timber Syndicate of Liverpool. They had circulated a reserve offer of one pound four shillings per acre, payable in three installments, total approximately 337,000 pounds. The current owner, the estate of the late Sir Hugh Lloyd-Vaughan, who had died without male issue in May, was understood to be willing.
The auction did not take place.
On the morning of October 10, a solicitor from Dolgellau named Owen Morgan Edwards walked into the offices of Williams and Sons with a sealed offer for the full reserve price plus six thousand pounds, contingent on conservation covenants. The offer was accompanied by a banker's letter of credit from the Bank of North Wales, signed by three trustees, valid for forty-eight hours.
Edwards was thirty-eight years old. He was a country solicitor with a modest practice. He had inherited approximately four thousand pounds from his father, a Methodist minister, in 1889. The remainder of the funds had been raised, in eleven days, from a list of subscribers Edwards had assembled by telegram and letter.
The story has been told before, but not often in its full archival detail. The papers of the Bank of North Wales, deposited at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth in 1962, contain the letter of credit and the underlying correspondence. The papers of Edwards himself, also at the National Library, contain the subscriber list.
The subscribers numbered forty-seven. They included Sir John Williams of Plas Llanstephan, the royal physician, who pledged fifteen thousand pounds. They included the Liverpool industrialist David Davies, whose family had built the Manchester ship canal works, and who pledged thirty thousand pounds. They included a Methodist congregation in Wrexham that pledged eighty-four pounds and sixpence.
The largest single contribution came from an American. A timber speculator in Pennsylvania named Ezra Wright, who had visited Cwm Elan on a holiday in 1888 and had stayed for a month in a farmhouse near Cwmystwyth, telegraphed forty-eight thousand pounds on October 6. His telegram, preserved in the Edwards papers, reads, For the trees not for me.
The historian Iorwerth Peate, whose 1972 study of Welsh upland conservation remains the standard work, identified Wright's contribution as the decisive one. Without it, Peate calculated, Edwards would have fallen short of the reserve price by roughly nine thousand pounds.
“The historian Iorwerth Peate, whose 1972 study of Welsh upland conservation remains the standard work, identified Wright's contribution as the decisive one.”
The sale closed on October 23, 1894. The estate was transferred to a trust, the Cwm Elan Conservation Trust, with seven named trustees. Edwards was the secretary and treasurer. He held the position for the remaining twenty-six years of his life, without salary.
The covenants on the land prohibited commercial timber extraction beyond what was necessary for maintenance of the existing forest. They prohibited mineral extraction. They prohibited the construction of any building taller than two stories or larger than four thousand square feet of footprint, with the exception of churches and schools.
They permitted, and indeed required, public access on foot.
The covenants were drafted by Edwards himself, with consultation from the conservancy lawyer J. C. Bowen-Davies. They are exhaustively detailed. They run to forty-three pages in the original deed, copies of which survive at the National Library and at the registry office in Aberystwyth.
Edwards's correspondence with Bowen-Davies during the drafting period, from July through September of 1894, is one of the more interesting documents in the file. The two men disagreed about the duration of the covenants. Bowen-Davies wanted ninety-nine years. Edwards wanted perpetuity.
Perpetuity won.
The Mersey Timber Syndicate did not, as one might expect, withdraw quietly. They challenged the trust's title in chancery in 1896, on procedural grounds related to the timing of the bank's letter of credit. The case was heard in London the following spring. The trust prevailed.
The syndicate appealed. The appeal was heard in 1899 and was again dismissed. The syndicate's costs in the two proceedings, by their own accounting in a circular to shareholders the following year, exceeded eleven thousand pounds.
Edwards represented the trust in both proceedings personally. He did not engage London counsel. He traveled by overnight train and slept in a small hotel near the Inns of Court. He won.
He continued his solicitor's practice in Dolgellau through the rest of his life. He was offered a baronetcy in 1907 in connection with the trust's work, and declined. He was offered a parliamentary seat by the Liberal party in 1910, and declined. He published, in 1912, a short book in Welsh on the trees of the upper Wye, which sold modestly.
He died on May 14, 1920, at the age of sixty-four, of pneumonia following an autumn walking tour of the estate the previous October. His will left the residual of his small fortune, slightly over six thousand pounds, to the trust.
The land Edwards preserved is now substantially within the Elan Valley estate, which was acquired by Birmingham Corporation for reservoir purposes in 1893 and which incorporated portions of the trust holdings under modified covenants. Other portions are now within the Cambrian Mountains conservation area and within forestry holdings of Natural Resources Wales.
Whether any of these subsequent uses match what Edwards intended is a question on which historians disagree. Peate considered the reservoir acquisition a betrayal. The more recent historian Robin Wynne Edwards, no relation, has argued in a 2009 essay that the trust's covenants survived the acquisition more substantially than is generally recognized.
What is certain is that the 47,000 acres of hardwood forest that the Mersey Timber Syndicate had intended to cut did not get cut. They are, in large part, still standing. The oldest oaks in the upper Elan, near Pont ar Elan, are now between four and five hundred years old. Edwards saved them when they were three hundred and fifty.
A small stone marker, placed near the chapel at Pen y Garreg in 1925 by the trustees of the trust, bears Edwards's name and the words, in Welsh, He bought the trees so they would stay. The marker is weathered now. The trees are not.
