Subject: FAO: Dr Driver: Aerial Discoveries & a Buried History From: Sion Buckler Direction: sent Date: Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:58 UTC Institution: RCAHMW (Royal Commission) Refs: none Archive id: gm-19fc40e3ff740538 ------------------------------------------------------------ Dear Dr. Driver, I hope this message finds you well. I wanted first to offer my sincere congratulations to you and the RCAHMW team on your recent aerial discoveries. There is something almost magical about the way a sustained spell of dry, sunny weather can strip back the concealment of centuries — revealing sites of profound historical importance that grass and topsoil have kept hidden from view for generations. It is a powerful reminder of how much of our past lies just beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to bring it back into the light. I write to you, however, about a site whose concealment has not been botanical, but bureaucratic and procedural. My family’s history — that of Great House Farm (Ty Mawr), Llandough, Vale of Glamorgan — has been covered up not by grass, but by what I can only describe, with careful precision, as a major scandal of documentary disappearance, procedural irregularity, and the systematic obscuring of a separate legal title. The farm, which stood beside St Dochdwy’s Church from at least the 13th century (and possibly as early as 1215), was home to the Williams family from 1667 and later the Buckler line. In 1876, the Bute Estate severed 33 acres for the Llandough Limeworks. Family testimony, supported by estate records, indicates that following this severance, the farmhouse, garden and curtilage may have been treated as a separate legal parcel — a freehold distinct from the surrounding agricultural leasehold. Yet this distinction, if it existed, was progressively obscured through decades of litigation, missing title deeds, and what appears to have been a conflation of two distinct legal interests. By the time of the 1987 Court of Appeal decision in BP Properties Ltd v Buckler [1987] EWCA Civ 2, the question of historical title had never been judicially determined. The court ruled on possession and the effect of a 1974 unilateral licence on adverse possession; it did not rule on whether the Williams family held a separate freehold to the farmhouse plot. The original Land Registry first-registration bundle (WA231076 / WA240304) remains inaccessible following an FOI refusal. The 1971 Ordnance Survey records have not been examined for descriptor shifts. And the 1667 transaction deed — a 999-year lease, effectively a virtual freehold — has never been located. The farm was demolished in December 1988. A 1994 rescue excavation by Cotswold Archaeological Trust revealed 1,026 early-medieval inhumation burials — the largest such population yet recovered from Wales — yet the demolition proceeded without archaeological condition. The RCAHMW’s own 1974 floor plan (ST 16817331, H.W. Thomas) documented late 17th–19th century features shortly before the final litigation. LiDAR data now show anomalous features near the former site that may indicate a far larger Roman landscape than previously understood. What I am asking, Dr. Driver, is whether the RCAHMW — with its unique statutory role in recording and protecting the historic environment of Wales — might look again at this site, not with a drone or an aerial camera, but with the same forensic attention to buried evidence that your team applies to cropmarks. The grass that covers your aerial sites is honest; it can be burned away by a hot summer. The concealment surrounding Great House Farm is of a different order entirely — it lies in missing documents, inaccessible registries, and a litigation record that addressed possession while never determining title. I would welcome the opportunity to share the full reconstructed chronology (Version 7.0) with you, and to discuss whether RCAHMW records, surveys, or cartographic archives might hold the key to uncovering what was truly lost at Llandough. With warm regards and renewed congratulations on your aerial survey successes, Hywel ap Buckler On behalf of the Restored House of Williams / Buckler Family Estate Great House, Manor of Llandough, Cardiff 📧 [email redacted] 📞 [phone redacted] --- P.S. — I have attached my notes.