The Ladies of Llangollen: Love, Liberty, and a Cottage in Wales
Updated: Aug 16
In 1778, two Irish aristocrats ran away from home together, got caught, tried again, and eventually built a life in a rented Welsh cottage that turned into one of the most talked about addresses in Georgian Britain. Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby spent the next fifty years there, hosting poets, generals and eventually a queen's own interest, while carefully never explaining exactly what their relationship was. Two centuries later, historians are still arguing about it, and once you get past the postcard version of the story, it's a lot stranger and more specific than two ladies who just liked living together.
Two Women Who Refused Arranged Marriages
Eleanor Charlotte Butler was born in 1739, the youngest daughter of a branch of the Butler family connected to the Earls of Ormond and raised largely at Kilkenny Castle. She spent her first eighteen years being educated at an English Benedictine convent in Cambrai, France, which left her fluent in French, sharply intelligent and, by every account, a serious reader with a taste for satire. Sarah Ponsonby, sixteen years younger and from the equally well connected Ponsonby family, was orphaned in 1768 at just thirteen and placed under the guardianship of a distant relative, Lady Elizabeth Fownes, at Woodstock House near Inistioge.
That same year, Eleanor, then twenty nine, effectively became Sarah's tutor at a boarding school in Kilkenny, and their friendship deepened steadily over the next decade through what one collection of their surviving letters calls an intimate correspondence. By the late 1770s both women were under real pressure. Eleanor, unmarried and considered a spinster at nearly forty, was being pushed by her family toward a French convent. Sarah, meanwhile, was fending off unwanted attention from Sir William Fownes, her guardian's own husband, with no dowry of her own to make a respectable marriage any kind of realistic escape route.
The Escape That Took Two Tries
On the night of March 30, 1778, Eleanor and Sarah slipped out dressed as men, carrying pistols, and rode toward Waterford intending to catch a boat out of Ireland. Sarah reportedly went out through a window with her pistol in one hand and her lapdog, Frisk, tucked under the other arm. They were caught before they got there, having spent a feverish night hiding out in a barn, and were marched back to their respective families as prisoners. Eleanor refused to give up and escaped a second time, hiding in Sarah's own bedroom at Woodstock House for weeks while a servant named Mary Carryl smuggled her food. After a tense standoff, both families reluctantly gave in, worn down by the effort of trying to keep the two women apart, on the condition that the two women leave Ireland for good and never come back, with small allowances attached to keep them from returning destitute.
They crossed from Waterford to Milford Haven that summer, spent months more or less wandering, and settled near Llangollen, North Wales, by September 1778. In February 1780 they moved into a small cottage called Pen y Maes and renamed it Plas Newydd, Welsh for New Place. It would be their only home for the rest of their lives.
Mary the Bruiser
Mary Carryl deserves more than a footnote in this story. Born into a poor family in Ross, County Wexford, she'd been working for the Fownes household at Woodstock, where her forceful temper earned her the nickname Mary the Bruiser, reportedly after she once threw a candlestick that injured another servant and got herself fired. She was also the one who kept Eleanor fed and hidden during those tense weeks in 1778, which says something about where her loyalties actually sat.
When Eleanor and Sarah settled in Wales, Mary came with them and effectively ran the household, negotiating with local tradesmen with the same force of personality that had gotten her sacked from her last job. Over the years she used her own savings to buy a field next to the property, worried the two women might one day be evicted, and left it to Sarah in her will when she died on November 22, 1809. The monument later raised to her at Llangollen calls her patient, industrious, faithful, generous and kind, which is a lot of gentle adjectives for a woman nicknamed the Bruiser.
Turning a Cottage Into a Gothic Fantasy
What started as a modest five room cottage grew, over five decades, into an elaborate showcase of Gothic Revival taste. Eleanor and Sarah filled it with carved oak panelling salvaged from demolished churches, pointed arch windows and stained glass, and built up a substantial library that reflected their shared appetite for languages and literature. The gardens held rescued ecclesiastical stonework too, including a medieval font reportedly taken from the nearby ruined Valle Crucis Abbey and, according to Welsh heritage records, part of Chester's medieval High Cross, torn down during the English Civil War and scattered for more than a century before some of it found its way to their garden.
Eleanor's own diary records a daily ritual she called the Home Circuit, a short walk they took around the garden every day without fail, breaking into a run when the weather turned bad. The house grew room by room and can practically be dated by its own renovations: a stone laid in 1778 marks an early extension from four rooms to five, the hall got new stone flooring in 1788 to replace what Eleanor called the odious tiles, the kitchen got a proper oven and hearth by 1795, the library was extended in 1792 with a new cellar dug beneath it, and by 1819 a Shropshire marble chimney piece had gone into the main bedchamber. Inside, visitors described beautiful busts including a particularly fine one of Lord Hill, wine decanters monogrammed B and P and Gothic cane sofas that concealed tiny wax figures of nuns, monks and a pope. Long after both women died, later owners kept altering the house further. General Yorke added a west wing between 1876 and 1890, and the Robertson family built an east wing around 1910 complete with parterre gardens, before both additions were stripped away in a 1960s restoration meant to bring Plas Newydd back closer to how the Ladies had actually left it.
These are images I took of the inside of the house. Please excuse the poor quality of the photos.
A Waiting List of the Famous and the Curious
Word of the two women spread fast, and Plas Newydd turned into something close to a tourist attraction on the road between Dublin and London, though Eleanor and Sarah were choosier about it than the legend suggests. Only the dining parlour and library were ever shown to strangers, and the two women reportedly retreated to their spare bedchamber during these inspections to watch new arrivals through the window before deciding whether they were worth actually receiving. William Wordsworth passed the test and wrote them a sonnet:
"To The Lady E B And The Hon Miss P"
A stream to mingle with your favorite Dee
Along the Vale of Meditation flows:
So styled by those fierce Britons, please to see
In Nature's face the expression of repose,
Or, haply there some pious Hermit chose
To live and die - the peace of Heaven his aim,
To whome the wild sequestered region owes
At this late day, its sanctifying name.
Glyn Cafaillgaroch, in the Cambrian touge,
In ours the Vale of Friendship, let this spot
Be nam'd, where faithful to a low roof'd Cot
on Deva's banks, ye have abode so long,
sisters in love, a love allowed to climb
Ev'n on this earth, above all reach of time
Robert Southey, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, essayist Thomas de Quincey and the actress Sarah Siddons all made the trip, as did the naturalist Josiah Wedgwood, who reportedly spent part of one visit lecturing them on rock formations. Publisher John Murray visited in 1829 and wrote afterward that the cottage was remarkable for the taste of its fitting up with ancient oak, presented by different friends, from old castles and monasteries. The Duke of Wellington called in and left carved wood as a gift, and Princess Caroline of Wales was among the notable names who made the trip too. In September 1788, King George III granted the pair a Civil List pension, said to have been arranged at Queen Charlotte's own urging.
Foreign visitors made the effort too. The French aristocrat Madame de Genlis stayed around 1809 and complained, good naturedly, about being kept awake by the pair's Aeolian harp. The German prince Hermann von Puckler-Muskau turned up in 1828, having reportedly first heard stories about the two women as a child roughly thirty years earlier, which gives some sense of how far their reputation had already traveled decades before he ever met them. Not every visit went smoothly. In 1822, a young Yorkshire diarist named Anne Lister made the roughly two hundred mile round trip from Halifax specifically to meet them, and wasn't invited back for a second visit. Lister, now best remembered through the television series Gentleman Jack for her own long term relationships with women, wrote afterward that she could not help thinking that surely it was not Platonic, a verdict she reached without ever getting a straight answer out of either woman.
The Pension That Was Always Late
That royal pension looked good on paper and was a headache in practice. Worth £100 a year, it arrived like clockwork running backward, never less than four months overdue and once nearly a year and a half late, with their own solicitor deducting his fee before handing over whatever was left. Family money filled the gaps, unevenly. Eleanor's brother John paid her £200 a year in quarterly instalments after their father's death, and a nephew, the Marquess of Ormonde, later arranged an additional £400 annuity that, predictably, also fell behind after he died. Sarah's income came mainly from a cousin, Mrs. Sarah Tighe, at around £100 a year, paid so irregularly that the amount seemed to shift with the exchange rate between British and Irish currency.
For two women whose home eventually held a growing library and rooms full of salvaged church carvings, the day to day reality was tighter than the legend suggests. They kept a household of just a gardener, footman and maid, considered the bare minimum acceptable for people of their background, and took out short term loans from their own solicitor to cover the months when nobody's money showed up on time.
The Libel Threat and the Question Nobody Has Settled
In 1791, a magazine article described their relationship in terms that clearly implied it was sexual, and the two women were furious enough to consult the statesman Edmund Burke about suing for libel. They ultimately let it drop. The novelist Maria Edgeworth used a thinly disguised version of them a decade later, in her 1801 story Angelina, or L'Amie Inconnue, as a cautionary example of exactly the kind of intense female friendship the Ladies represented. Modern historians still can't agree on a label. Some describe it as a romantic friendship or a Boston marriage, terms used for close, possibly non-sexual cohabitation between women of the period. Historian Norena Shopland argues the pair belong squarely in LGBTQ+ history as queer pioneers, while scholar Fiona Brideoake frames their entire way of living, not just their private life, as an act of resistance to convention.
It's a debate with close company elsewhere in this era's history. Cary Grant and Randolph Scott spent years sharing houses and headlines under a Hollywood studio system that demanded exactly this same kind of ambiguity, more than a century later and with a different set of social rules doing the enforcing. And it's worth remembering how much worse things could go for women who lived openly rather than ambiguously. A century and a half after Eleanor and Sarah settled into Plas Newydd, Eve Adams ran an openly lesbian tearoom in Greenwich Village and was eventually murdered at Auschwitz for the life she'd built there.
Fifty Years, One Grave
Eleanor died on June 2, 1829, at the age of ninety. Sarah outlived her by two and a half years, dying on December 9, 1831, at seventy six. Both were buried at St Collen's Church in Llangollen in the same grave as Mary Carryl, sharing a single monument between the three of them, the servant and the two women she'd once smuggled food to, together for good. By the 1880s the Pall Mall Gazette was already writing that their story should be known to everyone visiting the area. Plas Newydd is now run as a museum by Denbighshire County Council, a nearby hill is named Butler's Hill for Eleanor, and a local pub, the Ponsonby Arms, is reportedly named for Sarah.
Quick Answers
Were the Ladies of Llangollen a couple? Nobody alive today can say for certain, since neither woman left writing that spells it out directly. But they lived together for over fifty years, referred to each other as their better half, and shared a bed, finances and a household their entire lives. Historians today are split between calling it a romantic friendship and treating it as an early, well documented example of a queer relationship.
Where is Plas Newydd, home of the Ladies of Llangollen? Plas Newydd sits just outside the town of Llangollen in Denbighshire, North Wales. It's now a museum run by Denbighshire County Council and is open to the public.
