County town: Cardiff
Glamorgan developed from the medieval lordship of Glamorgan, based on the Norman conquest of the territory of the early medieval kingdom of Morgannwg. It became a shire county under the Laws in Wales Acts of 1536.
Glamorgan encompasses the fertile Vale of Glamorgan on the Bristol Channel coast, the former coal-mining valleys of the Rhondda, Cynon, and Taff, and the growing city of Cardiff. The Vale of Glamorgan — green, prosperous, and anglicised — was settled by Norman lords who built the string of castles from Cardiff to Ogmore-by-Sea that marks one of the most complete marcher landscapes in Wales. Cardiff, the county town, became the Welsh capital in 1955 and is home to the Senedd, the Welsh Parliament. The coal valleys, transformed from the 1840s by mass migration and industrial development, produced one of the most distinctive working-class cultures in Britain.
The historic counties of Wales were created under the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535–42, overlying a much older landscape of Welsh kingdoms — Gwynedd, Powys, Deheubarth, and Morgannwg — that had shaped settlement, culture, and lordship for centuries. The county of Glamorgan incorporates territory from these earlier political divisions, and its boundaries preserve traces of the medieval Welsh landscape.
Wales's 13 historic counties were created under the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535–42, which brought Wales into the English legal and administrative system. Based partly on medieval Welsh kingdoms and Norman lordships, they were the framework of Welsh administration until 1974.
This page introduces the historic county of Glamorgan. A full Aubrey report for a location within it pulls together everything the record actually holds about that ground, from the geology beneath it to the last coin dropped in a field:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Read in-depth research reports on notable historical places across the UK — explore →
An Aubrey report for a specific location in Glamorgan draws on historical maps, archaeological records, Domesday data and landscape history to tell the full story of any site in the county.