Moving to Wexford gave me a love of history: A conversation with Huw Rees

For Huw Rees, moving to Wexford didn’t just affect the way he views the future but also the way he sees the past…

25 years ago, Huw Rees left his home of Wales to begin a new life. His destination – Carrig-on-Bannow, a quiet village on Ireland’s South-East coast. Rees had met his future partner Margaret seven years previous and was now preparing to start a life with her in her native country of Ireland. As he crossed the Irish Sea for lands anew, he felt a mixture of excitement and fear at the thought of uprooting his whole life.

Over eight centuries ago, another man made this same trip. This adventurer departed Wales and sailed to Wexford in the summer of 1169. He too arrived in the Bannow area with the intention of starting a new and exciting life in Ireland. Only this man had his eyes set on siege and conquest. His name was Robert FitzStephen.

It was a name that Rees would soon become very familiar with. But when he first arrived in Wexford, it likely didn’t ring any bells. In fact, moving to Ireland led Rees to realize that he didn’t know as much about history as he thought. Rees was surprised with how little he knew about a country next door to his own.

“It was a bit of a culture shock. In Britain, you’re not educated much in Irish history. So, I was going to a place I thought I knew a bit about, but I didn’t. So, I started asking people.”

Rees was about to have an even more shocking revelation; he didn’t know much about his own history either.

“They’d ask me then about Welsh history. I realized that it was only superficial knowledge I had, and it wasn’t as deep as what I thought.”

Determined to find answers, Rees decided to learn more about Welsh history. What began with some light research in his spare time grew into something he couldn’t have imagined.

“I started doing a bit of research on Welsh history for my own interest. I was producing a lot of information, so I thought ‘I’ll put this on a Facebook page’ which I did. That proved popular because people were interacting with it.”

The Facebook page in question, The History of Wales, has thousands of fans from all over the world. To date, the page has amassed 216,000 followers.

“Because I was coming from a position of superficial knowledge, I was learning as I was going. So, it was snippets and easy to read information on what happened in Welsh history on a specific day. I began to see the importance of history and the development of it because I wasn’t concentrating on a particular period.”

Rees’ successful history blog caught the attention of the publishing world. In a sudden turn of events, he was contacted and offered a book deal.

“Some publishers from a university in Wales were reading the blog, they got hold of me and said that it would be interesting to put a book out, so we did. It’s a popular title. It’s one of their bestsellers. I was doing this in conjunction with my sister, who’s a retired schoolteacher.”

Wales on This Day was published by the University of Wales Press in 2022. Written by Rees and Sian Kilcoyne, the book contains historical facts about Wales for each day of the year. They followed this bestseller up with a second title, Welsh Women on This Day, just this year.

“That’s how I got hooked on history. It really is a passion now. Any sort of spare time I have I dedicate to it.”

In an ironic turn of events, it took moving to Wexford for Rees to get in touch with his Welsh roots. But Rees’ thirst for history doesn’t stop in Wales. He is also fascinated with the history of Ireland and Wexford, a place he has lived in for the past 25 years.

In another dose of irony, Rees’ home for the last two and half decades has been Bannow, where the Norman invasion of Ireland began in 1169. It was there that a force of Cambro-Normans (Welsh-Normans) led by Robert FitzStephen arrived and set their sights on Wexford town which they besieged and conquered in the days that followed.

“When you’re talking about history in Bannow, people always want to know about the Normans. They came from Wales, but the Normans were a group who were not native to Wales. They invaded England and then they pushed into Wales and established earldoms on the border of Wales from which they then infiltrated.”

The Normans were originally from Normandy in France but famously conquered England in 1066 in an event known as the Battle of Hastings. The leader of the Normans, William the Conqueror, was crowned King of England and a new era had begun. Over the next century, Normans and their descendants pushed into England, Wales and eventually, Ireland.

The Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland began in 1169 with the arrival of a contingent of largely Cambro-Norman forces including Robert FitzStephen and his half brother Maurice FitzGerald. They had been enticed over to Ireland by the former King of Leinster Diarmait MacMurrough, who invited key Norman figures to assist in his campaign to regain his kingship of Leinster. Richard de Clare, better known as ‘Strongbow’, arrived the following year and married MacMurrough’s daughter Aoife following the siege of Waterford.

FitzStephen is remembered most for his role in sparking the Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, but we have reason to believe he lived quite a charmed life before that. Being Norman and loyal to Henry II, then King of England, FitzStephen had many enemies in Wales. In fact, before leaving for Ireland, FitzStephen had been imprisoned by the native Welsh for a period.

“He was released on the condition he left Wales to take part in the Irish invasion. This Welsh connection led me to the connections between FitzStephen and other members of his family. It was a big family contingent that took part in the Norman invasion. That’s a fascinating story in itself.”

In recent months, Rees has taken his research to the public at the Irish National Heritage Park in Ferrycarrig, Wexford, where he has given talks on ‘Wales and Ireland before and after the Norman invasion’. Rees believes that Irish and Welsh history have a lot of connections worth exploring.

“There’s a massive connection between Wales and Ireland. A lot of the oral tradition and mythology of Wales and Ireland is intertwined so there was obviously a lot of travel back and forth. The highest concentrations of Ogham Stones outside of Ireland is in West Wales, so there is obviously a connection there going right back. Obviously, you’ve got Saint Patrick – it’s not definite that he was Welsh, but he was from West Britain.”

When most people move abroad, they start thinking differently about the future. When Huw Rees moved to Wexford, he started thinking differently about the past. 25 years, a hugely popular blog, two books and countless hours of research later, Huw Rees remains a devourer of history and a lover of all questions ‘why?’, ‘how?’ and, especially – ‘when?’. Considering his love of history started out in Wexford, it is understandable how Rees feels about the lack of a dedicated museum space in Wexford town.