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Queer Heritage · Llangollen, Denbighshire

Plas Newydd (the Ladies of Llangollen)

Two upper-class Irish women who eloped in 1778 to set up home together, scandalising and enthralling Georgian society; their Gothic cottage drew Wordsworth, Byron, Wellington and Walter Scott, and Queen Charlotte won them a royal pension. A cornerstone of British queer heritage — Anne Lister herself visited.

StatusDocumented history
Datesettled c.1780, ~50 years together
The peopleLady Eleanor Butler, Sarah Ponsonby, Anne Lister (visitor)
The sitePlas Newydd House & Gardens, Hill Street, Llangollen LL20 8AW
Coordinates52.96710, -3.16550 (confidence 5/5)

The story

In 1778 Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, two aristocratic Irishwomen forbidden to be together, eloped from County Kilkenny — Ponsonby reportedly in men's clothes with a pistol. Caught and returned, they tried again, and their exhausted families finally let them go with small allowances. They settled above Llangollen in a cottage they renamed Plas Newydd and spent fifty years turning it into a black-and-white Gothic fantasy of carved oak, pointed arches and salvaged church fonts. Dressed alike in dark riding habits with powdered hair, reading in four languages, they called their life "delicious retirement" and became, paradoxically, celebrities: Wordsworth, Byron, Wellington, Walter Scott and Josiah Wedgwood all climbed the hill to visit, and Queen Charlotte helped win them a royal pension in 1788. Whether they were lovers cannot be known — they insisted on chaste "romantic friendship", a framing that was also a shield — but a 1790 newspaper article, "Extraordinary Female Affection", enraged them by hinting otherwise, Hester Thrale privately called them "damned Sapphists", and Anne Lister, visiting in 1822, doubted the relationship was platonic. The house is now a museum owned by Denbighshire County Council.

More stories at this spot

The house that ate churches

The Ladies were magpies of the Gothic. Much of Plas Newydd's astonishing carved-oak interior was salvaged from demolished churches and old furniture, and in the garden they set a medieval font from the ruined Valle Crucis Abbey and a fragment of Chester's High Cross. They were curating a mood — melancholy, medieval, deliberately out of time — a century before anyone called it heritage.

Wordsworth's bad sonnet

In 1824 Wordsworth visited and wrote a sonnet praising Plas Newydd as a "low-roofed Cot" in a "Vale of Friendship". The Ladies were reportedly less than thrilled that he had called their beloved house a cot. Byron was ruder in private and Hester Thrale ruder still; being famous for wanting to be left alone brought a great deal of company and comment.

The pension and the poverty

For all their grand visitors, the Ladies were chronically short of money, their families' allowances barely covering the constant improvements. Queen Charlotte's intercession secured Eleanor Butler a royal pension in 1788, and various admirers left them legacies. They lived, in effect, on their celebrity — the price of a private life made public.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Queer HeritageThe Ladies of Llangollen's TombLlangollen, Denbighshire · Wales

Two runaway Irish gentlewomen who slept in one bed for fifty years, and the diarist 'Gentleman Jack' who came to see whether it was 'platonic'.

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The only medieval Welshwoman with a surviving body of verse — and she used it to write 'Ode to the Vulva', scolding male poets for praising everything but 'the best bit'.

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Documented history

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