Story of Norton, Powys, The

Description

Norton, as Keith Parker describes, is sandwiched between Offa’s Dyke and the English Welsh border, a position that proved fraught in earlier centuries. Its Norman castle probably shared a similar fate to the castle at the centre of Knighton, changing hands a few times and probably being burnt to the ground on more than one occasion.

But activity surrounding the small settlement established round the church and castle was and is largely devoted to farming, and it has been the prosperity, or otherwise, of agriculture that has been of greatest concern over most decades. In prosperous times the owners of much of the surrounding land who lived at Impton and then Norton Manor, or at Boultibroke on the edge of Presteigne, have had money to invest locally and the wherewithal to hire servants. With the passing of the Prices and Green Prices at Norton, and the Jones Brydges at Boultibrooke, the estates have been broken up and farms owned by a wider range of people. In recent decades much new housing has been built and the settlement risks becoming simply a satellite of Presteigne.

As a result of trawling through newspapers and records down the centuries, local historian Keith Parker, already the author of books on Presteigne, Knighton, Radnorshire politics and the Civil War in the county, tells how the settlement has fared down the years.

Paperback | 96 pages | 242 x 171 mm | 2016
45 photographs, maps, family trees and tables
ISBN 978-1-910839-10-2