In 1994 the country house at Rhosygilwen, near the village of Rhoshill in Pembrokeshire, was a ruin scheduled for demolition. A fire in 1985 had gutted the upper floors. The roof was failing. The local council was running out of patience. A businessman named Glen Peters bought the wreck instead of letting it fall, and over the next thirty years did something unusual with it: he turned a Georgian-era Welsh mansion into a working centre for renewable energy, eco-housing, the arts, and the kind of cultural events that small Welsh villages do not usually host. By 2025 he had been appointed MBE in the King's Birthday Honours.
Rhosygilwen had belonged to the Jones family until 1697, when it passed to the Colby family — the same family that produced Thomas Frederick Colby, the geographer raised here, whose father Thomas Colby was High Sheriff of Pembrokeshire in 1771. The house was rebuilt in the 1830s and again towards the end of the 19th century, in the elaborate Victorian taste of country house improvement. It passed through ownership in the 20th century and into a long slow decline. The 1985 fire damaged the upper floors but, against considerable odds, spared the original oak central staircase — the kind of architectural survival that makes restoration possible rather than rebuilding necessary. By 1994 the building was effectively condemned. The town of Cilgerran, immediately to the south, was a former marcher borough that had seen better days. Pembrokeshire's grand houses were, in those years, mostly being subdivided into flats or quietly lost.
The Peters acquisition in 1994 began with the obvious: the roof, the walls, the structural work that any conservation project starts with. But the family's ambitions for the place went further. They aimed to use the house not as a private museum or even a country hotel, but as a working venue. The coach house and gated entrance are listed buildings in their own right; the restored mansion sits in twenty acres of garden and woodland. By the 2010s Rhosygilwen had become something its 19th-century owners would not have recognised: a centre for culture, retreat, celebration, eco-housing planning, and renewable energy. The Penfro Book Festival, Pembrokeshire's annual literary event, is hosted at Rhosygilwen each summer. In June 2023 BBC Radio's Any Questions? was broadcast live from the house, the kind of programme that signals a place has been taken seriously.
In 2011, Western Solar — a company with its headquarters at Rhosygilwen — installed Wales' first utility-scale solar farm in a six-acre field on the estate. Ten thousand solar panels went up. The BBC reported it as Wales' first solar park; it generated enough electricity to power 300 homes. This was almost ten years before solar farms became commonplace in Britain, and the planning processes and engineering had to be worked out largely from scratch. In 2024 the planning committee backed a wind turbine application — a 20-storey-high turbine, according to the local press — designed to stabilise the estate's electricity supply through winter months when solar output drops. The turbine was installed in 2025. The combination of solar farm, wind turbine and a carbon-neutral arts venue made Rhosygilwen one of the most demonstrably committed renewable-energy estates in Wales.
The 250-seat performance hall at Rhosygilwen is called Neuadd y Dderwen — The Oak Hall — and is built to carbon-neutral specifications, an unusual commitment for a rural concert venue. Performers who have played there include Catrin Finch, one of the great harpists of her generation; the Welsh soprano Shân Cothi; and the folk singer Maddy Prior, who founded Steeleye Span and has been performing for sixty years. Menter Rhosygilwen, a limited company set up to support performing arts at the venue, launched a music bursary in 2024; it was increased the following year because the standard of applications was so high. A pair of local musicians received four-figure bursaries in January 2025. The bursary is the kind of small, sustained intervention that builds a Welsh musical infrastructure quietly, year by year.
The Rhosygilwen model extends beyond the estate itself. In June 2014, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park approved a Western Solar plan for six sustainable homes at Glanrhyd, with conditions that the buildings be manufactured locally and that residents receive free solar-powered electricity. The development was completed in 2017; the Guardian wrote about it as the first solar eco-hamlet in Wales. A second project at Boncath, called Berllan Aur, began construction in 2019 using locally-sourced materials where possible and was ready for residents in 2021. Dr Peters was appointed MBE in the 2025 King's Birthday Honours for services to green energy and eco housing — a recognition for what is, in the end, an experiment in showing that a Welsh country estate can be more than a heritage destination. It can be a working laboratory for how to live well, cheaply, and lightly on the land.
Rhosygilwen sits at 52.03 degrees north, 4.62 degrees west, near the village of Rhoshill in the community of Cilgerran, Pembrokeshire — about 7 nm south of Cardigan. From the air the estate appears as a cluster of buildings in mature woodland on rolling country south of the Teifi valley. The 2011 solar farm is a distinctive geometric grid in a six-acre field nearby; the 2025 wind turbine adds a vertical landmark. Cilgerran with its castle ruin lies 1.5 nm north. Best viewed at 1,500-2,500 feet AGL. Nearest airfield is Haverfordwest (EGFE), about 13 nm south-southwest. Surrounding country is rolling pasture cut by the Teifi gorge to the north.