The National Monuments Record of Wales: Collecting Our Past

In 1908 Royal Commissions were founded for Scotland, Wales and England respectively and charged with creating ‘inventories’ of monuments worthy of note. From this time the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) set about surveying and recording appropriate sites and publishing its findings in county-based inventories. Such work inevitably accrued a considerable volume of records, including survey notes, photographs and drawings, but, although these were originally preserved in sets of working files, there was no dedicated record or information service within the Royal Commission.

However, in 1963 the National Monuments Record of Wales (NMRW) was formally established as RCAHMW’s records arm, with the transfer, in principle, of the Welsh sections of the former National Buildings Record (NBR), one of the collections highlighted in this exhibition. Despite this official establishment in name, it was not until the late 1970s that the NMRW employed specialist records staff and took possession of the bulk of the Welsh NBR records. During the early 1980s RCAHMW also took over the duties of the Archaeology Branch of the Ordnance Survey, adding further significant records. The NMRW continued to accumulate material produced by RCAHMW’s professional investigators, through both publication work and the emergency recording of threatened sites, and began to actively seek relevant collections from various external sources, including professional and commercial bodies, academic institutions and private individuals.

As collections have grown the NMRW has improved the organisation and archival storage of its holdings and their public access facilities, and it is now firmly established as the primary national collection of architectural and archaeological records for Wales. The archive currently occupies over 350 square metres of floor space in stores and consists of over 3 million pages of text, more than 1¼ million photographs, approximately 67,000 drawings, 17,000 maps, and over 25,000 digital records. The NMRW is recognised as an official place of deposit for public records by The National Archives (TNA) and has specialist archive stores with full environmental control. These extensive holdings are accessed by a wide range of users, including professional archaeologists and historians, those involved in development control, planning and heritage protection, students from primary school to university, and interested members of the public.


External Links

Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales website