Chair, councillors, thank you for placing this on the agenda.
My grandmother was Mary Williams of Great House Farm, Tŷ Mawr, beside St Dochdwy's Church. Our family account is that we lived in that house from 1667 until it was demolished at about four in the morning on 6 December 1988.
Item 10 describes a plaque and a mailing list. The subject is wider than that, so I will take it in short parts.
The house. Heneb's record says the manorial courts of Llandough and Leckwith sat at Great House. The Local Plan said its buildings should be retained. It was never fully recorded before it came down.
The ground. A published study reports 1,026 burials from the early medieval cemetery excavated there in 1994, the largest such population recovered in Wales. The monastery's exact site has never been established. Nothing on the ground marks any of it, and the Council's own village history does not mention Great House.
My grandmother. For decades she said the house was hers. She refused every tenancy offered for it. In February 1983, while she lived there, BP applied to register the farmhouse as its own title; she died that March. In 1987, while the appeal was running, that title was merged into the fields.
The courts. They decided who could stay. The family lost. They did not decide who owned the house. The house came down the morning after Cadw refused to list it, while our Strasbourg application was pending.
The records. More than twenty bodies have been asked. Cadw's 1988 file is missing with no record of destruction. The Land Registry's list of 43 documents does not include the 1969 deed BP's title rests on. The Ministry of Justice has not yet answered our MP.
Our research has only started. Nothing yet meets the threshold to reopen the case, and we do not claim it does. That is why the records matter.
We ask for four things. Put our statement on the public record. Make Great House Farm a standing item, with a named councillor. Recommend to the Senedd that an independent inquiry be considered. And write in support of disclosure and preservation of the records. We also ask you to recognise what three generations of my family have been through. We are not seeking anyone's home at Church View Close.
Your mission is “Serving our community, preserving our identity”. Tŷ Mawr is part of that identity. Thank you.
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