Commercial nineteenth-century rabbit farming in the Brecon Beacons

The article considers three large rabbit warrens at Cefn Cul, Crai and Pant Mawr constructed on marginal land in the Brecon Beacons in the mid-nineteenth century and represented in the field by pillow mounds, pit-traps, stone-walled enclosures and warreners' houses. Though poorly documented, the warrens were probably all in a single ownership and constructed by Joseph Claypon, a member of a Lincolnshire banking family, following his acquisition of land in the Beacons as a creditor of the entrepreneur John Christie. The warrens were probably in use between the late 1830s and the late 1850s and may have been exploited in conjunction with the adjacent Brecon Forest Tramroad. Unique in Wales, comparisons are drawn with a number of similar large commercial warrens established in various parts of England in the mid to later nineteenth century.