Hen Allt Common

My attention has been drawn to an auction of land just outside Hay.  It's not something I would normally pay any attention to, but there seems to be something odd about this particular sale.

 Hen Allt Common is an area of grazing land and woodland between Cusop and Llanigon.  There's an online auction going on now (with about 7 hours to go as I type this), though the bidding hasn't met the reserve price yet (the highest bid so far is £11,500).

There's a slight problem with this, though - nobody is sure who owns the land.

At the moment, the 25 acres are administered by the local authorities in conjunction with Natural Resources Wales - the Common is an SSSI, or Site of Special Scientific Interest - but they are not selling the land.  The seller is Trelleck Estate Ltd., run by someone calling himself the Lord Marcher of Trelleck.

And this is where it gets interesting - the Lord Marcher of Trelleck is a businessman called Mark Roberts, and he has tried to sell land he doesn't actually own before.  He's even got his own Wikipedia page.

In 2015, it was reported in the Western Telegraph that Mark Roberts was trying to sell 25 acres of land in the village of Spittal, Pembrokeshire, as the Manor of Spittal, which he claimed was land that went with his title.  The newspaper reported that this was not the first time Mr Roberts had tried to do this - he had also claimed other pieces of land, and also the rights to shipwrecks round the coast, which led to a court case.

In 2017, an article in the Daily Post reported that he was trying to sell the Common at St. Asaph, in North Wales, again as land which went with one of his titles - this was contested by St. Asaph City Council and the University of Wales, which owned a part of the plot, an 8 acre site beside the River Elwy.  Fishing rights were included in the auction lot.

He also tried to charge local residents of Peterstone in South Wales £45,000 for access to pathways and verges.  However, if a pathway has been used for 20 years or more, the law states that no charges can be made.

And those are just the more recent articles - I also found a piece from the Daily Mail dating back to 2007, detailing several court cases that Mr Roberts had already been involved with.

And now he's claiming Hen Allt Common.

There's a common thread between all of the more recent attempted sales - they have all gone through Paul Fosh Auctions, based in Newport.

In the same online auction as Hen Allt Common, Paul Fosh Auctions also has listed one of Mark Roberts' many titles, for sale with a reserve price of £2,500.  The bidding on this lot has not met the reserve price yet.  It's for the title of the Lordship of the Manor of Leye.  A map is included with the auction listing.  The original manor seems to be somewhere near Montgomery, but what is on offer is only the title, with no rights to land attached.

Natural Resources Wales have been made aware of the auction of Hen Allt Common, so it remains to be seen if the lot reaches its reserve price....