Today, I am chatting with David E. Owen about When the Stones Held, a historical novel inspired by the remarkable life of Welsh stonemason and bridge builder William Edwards.
Born into a farming family in eighteenth-century South Wales, Edwards had little formal education and no engineering training, yet he took on the formidable challenge of spanning the River Taff at Pontypridd. His eventual achievement would endure for centuries, but the journey towards it was marked by failure, devastating floods, financial risk and an extraordinary determination to keep trying. Pasted markdown
David joins me today to talk about discovering the man behind the famous bridge, recreating the rural Welsh community in which William lived, and turning an extraordinary true story of ingenuity and perseverance into historical fiction.
But first, let's check out When the Stones Held
Publication Date: 16th May 2026
Publisher: Independently Published
Print Length: 331 Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
Publisher: Independently Published
Print Length: 331 Pages
Genre: Historical Fiction
When The Stones Held is an unforgettable historical novel inspired by the true story of William Edwards, the self taught Welsh stonemason who built one of the greatest bridges of the eighteenth century.
Born into poverty in the remote valleys of South Wales, William grows up in a world shaped by hard labour, dangerous rivers, and communities struggling to survive. Education is rare. Opportunity is rarer still. Yet from childhood, William becomes fascinated by stone, by balance, and by the dream of building something that will outlive him.
As the coal trade begins transforming Wales and merchants demand safer routes through the valleys, William sets himself an impossible task, to build a bridge across the fierce River Taff where others have failed. Floods destroy his work. Rivals mock him. Powerful men try to break him. Each collapse threatens his reputation, his livelihood, and the people he loves.
Set against the harsh beauty of eighteenth century Wales, When The Stones Held is a story of ambition, resilience, love, grief, and determination. It brings to life the people, language, and struggles of a forgotten world while telling the remarkable true story behind the bridge that gave birth to the town of Pontypridd.
Perfect for readers who enjoy rich historical fiction, Welsh history, and stories of ordinary people achieving extraordinary things.
When the Stones Held is inspired by the remarkable true story of William Edwards, the self-taught Welsh stonemason behind the famous bridge at Pontypridd. When did you first come across William’s story, and what convinced you that his life deserved to become a novel?
I grew up in Cilfynydd, just outside Pontypridd, so William Edwards' bridge was always part of the landscape I knew. Like many things you grow up with, I accepted that it was there without thinking very much about the man who had built it.
It was years later, after I’d left Pontypridd and started to explore the world, that I realised that the familiar bridge concealed an extraordinary story. Here was a man from eighteenth-century rural Wales, with little formal education and no training as an engineer, who was prepared to take on the challenge of spanning the River Taff. He was only twenty-seven when he accepted the commission and had never built a bridge before.
I began wondering about the person behind the achievement. Where did that confidence come from? What made someone with his background believe that he could solve a problem that defeated others? And what must it have been like for his family and the people around him to watch him attempt it?
The more I researched him, the more I realised that this wasn't simply the story of a famous Welsh bridge. It was the story of an apparently ordinary man attempting something extraordinary. That was when I knew I wanted to write When the Stones Held.
William grows up in poverty in eighteenth-century South Wales, in a world where education and opportunity are limited. How much is known about his early life, and how did you approach filling the gaps in the historical record while remaining faithful to the man he might have been?
Surprisingly little is known about William's early life. I found that he was born in 1719 in the parish of Eglwysilan, into a farming family, and that his formal education would have been limited. I also found something of the man he eventually became: a stonemason, builder, minister and someone with an extraordinary practical understanding of structures. But there are large gaps between the boy and the man.
Those gaps were both a challenge and an opportunity. I didn't want to invent an exceptional child simply because I knew he would become an exceptional adult. I wanted him to grow into his abilities. So, I tried to imagine a boy learning through observation, watching how people worked, how stone behaved, how water moved and how things were put together.
The important thing for me was that the fictional elements should remain plausible within the world that William inhabited. I researched the lives of ordinary people in eighteenth-century South Wales, their homes, work, religion, education and communities, and used that world to fill the spaces where the historical record falls silent.
I could never know exactly what the young William thought or experienced. My aim was to create a childhood from which the William Edwards we do know could credibly have emerged.
One of the most compelling aspects of William’s story is his fascination with stone, structure, and the possibility of building something that could withstand the River Taff. What interested you most about exploring the mind of a man who had no formal engineering education yet attempted something so ambitious?
What fascinated me was the difference between education and intelligence. William had no formal engineering training, but that doesn't mean he approached the problem without knowledge. His education came from working with stone, observing buildings and understanding through experience what worked and what didn't.
I wanted to explore how someone like William might have looked at the world around him. A wall wouldn't simply be a wall. He would notice how the stones fitted together, where the weight was an issue, and why one structure survived while another failed. The same applied to the river. The Taff wasn't simply an obstacle to be crossed. Its force, its changing level and the damage it could cause were all problems he had to understand.
That gave me one of the most enjoyable aspects of writing the novel. I could allow William to solve problems gradually rather than suddenly giving him the answer because history tells us that he eventually found it. He experiments, makes mistakes, observes what happens and changes his thinking.
I think that is what makes his achievement so remarkable. William didn't possess knowledge that nobody else had, but he had the ability to look closely at what was in front of him, learn from it, and then ask whether there might be another way of doing things.
Building the bridge is far from a straightforward triumph. William faces failure, devastating floods, financial pressures, and the judgement of those who doubt him. How important was it to show the failures and setbacks rather than simply concentrating on his eventual achievement?
The failures were essential. If I had simply taken William from accepting the commission to completing the bridge, I think I would have missed the most remarkable part of his story.
His first bridge across the Taff was actually completed successfully, only to be destroyed by a catastrophic flood. He rebuilt it, but that attempt failed as well. Each time he had to confront not only the practical consequences, but also the financial and personal ones. He had given guarantees over the work, so failure wasn't something he could simply walk away from.
For the novel, I wanted the reader to experience those setbacks alongside him, to watch the work being done, see the stone rising and share the expectation that he would succeed. Only then would its destruction mean something. I wanted the eventual bridge to become far more significant because the reader understood what it cost him to reach that point.
I also wanted to avoid the inevitability that can sometimes creep into historical fiction. We know William Edwards built the bridge because it is still standing there. William didn't know that. At each failure, there was no guarantee that another attempt would succeed. While writing those scenes, I tried to forget the ending and stay with a man who had to decide whether he was prepared to try again.
The River Taff is almost a character in its own right: dangerous, unpredictable, and essential to the lives of the communities surrounding it. How did you approach bringing the river and the landscape of eighteenth-century Wales to life?
The landscape was particularly important to me because it’s the landscape I grew up in. That was useful because many of my childhood memories are of exploring the countryside away from the towns. I know the Taff, the surrounding hills and the way the valley confines everything within it. I stripped away the Pontypridd of today and went back to the countryside I remembered exploring, imagining the same place before roads, railways, terraces and industry transformed it.
The river was central to that. Today we can cross the Taff without giving it much thought, but for William's community it could determine where people travelled, traded and worked. In normal conditions it might appear manageable, but after prolonged rain the same river could become immensely powerful. William's first bridge was destroyed by a flood, so that unpredictability is fundamental to his story.
I wanted the Taff to be a constant presence in the novel without repeatedly telling the reader that it was dangerous. Its character comes through what people do because of it: watching the weather, judging the water level, choosing whether it is safe to cross, or hearing its changing sound before they can see what is happening.
Growing up there helped. I wasn't trying to invent a landscape. I was trying to imagine a landscape I already knew, then remove more than two centuries of change and discover what William Edwards might have seen.
The novel is set during a period when the coal trade was beginning to transform South Wales and reliable routes across the valleys were becoming increasingly important. What research did you undertake into the everyday lives, working conditions, communities, and developing industries of the period?
One of the most important parts of the research was making sure I didn't accidentally put the nineteenth century into the eighteenth. We tend to think of the South Wales valleys in terms of coal mines, railways, terraced houses and heavy industry, but William Edwards lived at an earlier stage of that transformation. Coal was already becoming increasingly important, but the communities around him were still predominantly rural.
I researched the developing coal trade, the early industries of the area and, particularly, how people and goods moved through the valleys. Before railways and canals transformed transport, journeys depended on tracks, roads, packhorses and river crossings. That helped me understand why a reliable bridge across the Taff mattered. It wasn't simply a piece of engineering. It could affect where people worked, where goods could be sold and how communities connected with one another.
I also spent a great deal of time looking at ordinary life: what people ate, what they wore, the houses they lived in, how they worked, worshipped and travelled, and what happened when they became ill or injured. Those details were important because I wanted William's world to feel inhabited rather than simply provide a historical background for his achievements. One detail that surprised me came when I researched William's marriage. I discovered that the ceremony wasn't necessarily the special event we would expect today, but would simply be incorporated into a normal chapel service.
Then there was the practical research into William's work. I needed to understand stone, quarrying, lime mortar, masonry and eighteenth-century bridge building well enough to describe what he was doing without turning the novel into an engineering manual. The challenge was to understand the technicalities, then allow the reader to experience them through William.
I used historical accounts, maps and records alongside later research, but inevitably there are gaps. We know certain things about William Edwards and his achievements, but we don't know what was said around his table at night or what his family thought when his first bridge was destroyed. That's where I had to step in as the novelist.
Perhaps the most useful principle was that I researched what wasn't there as carefully as what was. I had to strip away the railways, the terraces and much of the industry we now associate with the valleys. Only then could I begin to see the world in which William Edwards actually lived.
William Edwards was a real man, but When the Stones Held is a novel rather than a biography. Did writing about a historical figure bring a different sense of responsibility, particularly when creating his private thoughts, relationships, conversations, and emotions?
Yes, very much so. I felt a responsibility to William Edwards because he was a real person, and because many of the people around him were real too. I was also aware that living relatives of William might read the story. I wanted to tell a compelling story, but I didn't want the demands of the novel to distort what is actually known about him.
The difficulty is that the historical record gives us the events of a life, but rarely the private moments. We know that William built the bridges, that some failed and that he continued trying, but we don't know what he felt when someone close to him died, what his wife said to him in private, or whether he ever doubted himself. Yet those are precisely the things I needed if the reader was going to see him as a human being rather than simply a name in a history book.
I tried to deal with that by making a clear distinction in my own mind between fact and invention. I didn't change the major events simply because something else would make a better story. Where the historical record was silent, I allowed myself to imagine what might reasonably have happened, but I wanted that invention to remain consistent with the man, the period and the circumstances.
The relationships were particularly important. William didn't live his life in isolation. He was a husband, a father, a craftsman, a minister and a member of a community. Bringing those parts of his life into the novel inevitably required invention, particularly in conversations and emotions, but I wanted the people around him to have lives and opinions of their own rather than exist simply to admire him.
I think the responsibility became greatest when I looked inside William’s mind. I can never know what William Edwards actually thought as he looked at the remains of a bridge that had collapsed. What I can do is ask what a man in his position might have felt, knowing what we do about what happened before and afterwards.
Ultimately, I wasn't trying to claim that this was exactly who William Edwards was in private. I was trying to create a William who could plausibly have been the man behind the historical record, while remaining faithful to the things we do know about him.
Much of your previous fiction has been fast-paced contemporary work dealing with subjects such as corruption, power, and social issues. What was it like stepping into historical fiction, and did you find that your experience as a thriller writer influenced the way you told William’s story?
It was a considerable change. I started writing fantasy novels twenty-five years ago, and initially I enjoyed the freedom of creating characters and entire worlds, but eventually I tired of it. That led me to spy novels, where I had something of a head start because someone I know had worked in a number of embassies and could give me an insight into that world. I'm still enjoying writing those, but I've found historical fiction to be perhaps the greatest challenge. The setting, language and pace are different, and the need to research the time, the place and the people makes the work much harder, but ultimately more rewarding.
Writing historical fiction did force me to slow down in some ways. In a contemporary thriller, characters can move quickly from one place to another, communicate instantly and react to events almost immediately. William's world operated at a completely different pace. Journeys took time, information travelled slowly and communities were much more dependent on the people immediately around them. I had to learn to work with that rather than impose the pace of a modern thriller on an eighteenth-century story.
I think my experience writing first fantasy and then thrillers influenced the structure of the novel. Fantasy had taught me the importance of landscape in building a believable world, while thrillers had taught me the importance of tension.
William attempts something extraordinarily ambitious, it fails, he tries again, and each attempt carries consequences for himself, his family and the community. I didn't need to manufacture suspense because it was already there. The challenge was to make the reader experience that uncertainty even though they might already know that the bridge at Pontypridd was eventually built.
Interestingly, my own first attempt at recreating William's world also failed. When I sent the original version to my chosen readers for criticism, the responses were disappointing. They had grown up reading my stories about characters battling monsters and then fighting corruption and powerful adversaries. Suddenly I'd given them a story which, although true, felt rather flat. That made me realise that historical accuracy alone wasn't enough. I needed to find the drama within William's story, and I needed the other characters to have ambitions, interests and opinions of their own. Sometimes those would support William and sometimes they would put pressure on him or stand in his way. That allowed his own character to emerge much more strongly.
There were also themes that felt familiar. My contemporary novels explore people confronted by institutions, power or circumstances beyond their control. William's world was very different, but questions of ambition, reputation, money, class and opportunity were still present. What interested me most, though, was the individual at the centre of it. Here was someone without formal engineering training attempting something that established builders had struggled to achieve.
Perhaps the biggest difference was that historical fiction gave me more room to stay with people. A thriller is constantly pulling the characters towards the next threat or revelation. With William, I could spend more time with his family, his community and the ordinary experiences that shaped him. I found that I enjoyed that enormously.
So I think the thriller writer came with me, particularly in the pacing and the desire to keep the reader asking what happens next. But the fantasy writer came too, particularly in the importance I placed on landscape and creating William's world. Historical fiction brought those two experiences together, while also teaching me when to let the story breathe. I think that was probably the biggest lesson I took from writing When the Stones Held.
Beneath the story of the bridge is a very human story about ambition, resilience, grief, family, and refusing to accept defeat. What did you come to admire most about William Edwards while researching and writing the novel?
What I came to admire most was his determination, but also the fact that it seems to have existed alongside an extraordinary willingness to learn. It would be easy to portray William as someone who simply refused to give up, but I think that misses something important. Persistence on its own isn't enough. When something failed, he had to understand why it had failed and then find another way.
That becomes particularly striking when you consider where he came from. He wasn't formally trained as an engineer. He grew up in rural Wales with limited educational opportunities, yet he was prepared to take on problems that would have challenged people with far greater advantages. There must have been enormous self-belief in that, but I don't see it as arrogance. He seems to have been someone who believed that if he could understand a problem, he could find a solution.
The failures made me admire him more than the eventual success. It's easy to look at the bridge today and see the achievement, but we know the ending. William didn't. When his first bridge was destroyed by floodwater, and when later attempts failed, he had no guarantee that another attempt would succeed. He also had a family to support and a reputation that could be damaged. Continuing wasn't an abstract act of resilience. There were consequences if he got it wrong.
I also became interested in the apparent contrast between his ambition and the rest of his life. He wasn't simply a bridge builder pursuing fame. He was a husband and father, a craftsman and a minister. The same man who was attempting an extraordinary engineering feat was also living within a small community and preaching to people who knew him personally. That made him much more interesting to me than the image of a solitary genius.
Perhaps what I admire most, then, is that he appears to have remained capable of changing his mind. Each failure forced him to reconsider what he thought he knew. Eventually, the solution came from understanding why the previous solutions hadn't worked.
For me, that's what makes William Edwards remarkable. The bridge is the monument we can still see, but the more interesting achievement was the determination to keep learning until he found a way to make it stand.
William could never have known that his bridge would become so closely associated with Pontypridd and that people would still be talking about his achievement centuries later. What do you hope readers will take away from When the Stones Held about William Edwards, the community he came from, and the extraordinary legacy he left behind?
I hope, first of all, that readers come away seeing William Edwards as a person rather than simply the man who built a famous bridge. The bridge has survived for centuries, but that very permanence can make it difficult to imagine the uncertainty, failures and personal cost that came before it. We see the finished structure. William never had that certainty while he was building it.
I also hope readers understand something about the community that produced him. William didn't emerge from a university or an established engineering profession. He came from rural South Wales, from a society where opportunities were limited and practical knowledge was often acquired through work, observation and experience. The people around him mattered too. One of the things I wanted the novel to show was that extraordinary achievements don't happen in isolation. There were families, craftsmen, labourers and communities living alongside the events we now call history.
For readers who know Pontypridd, I hope the novel changes the way they see something that has always been there. That certainly happened to me. Growing up nearby, I knew the bridge without really thinking about the young man who had stood beside the Taff and decided that he could span it. Now I find it impossible to separate the bridge from William and the people who inhabited that landscape with him.
For readers who don't know Wales, I hope it introduces them to a part of Welsh history that deserves to be better known. William's achievement was extraordinary, particularly when you consider his background and the resources available to him. Yet outside Wales, relatively few people know his name.
Perhaps most of all, I hope readers take something from his response to failure. We tend to celebrate the bridge that survived, but I'm equally fascinated by the bridges that didn't. Without those failures, and without William's willingness to learn from them and begin again, there would be no bridge for us to admire today.
More than two and a half centuries later, people still cross the Taff beneath something William Edwards imagined and then found a way to build. I can't think of many better definitions of a legacy than that.
A huge thank you to David E. Owen for joining me today and taking us behind the story of When the Stones Held.
If you enjoy historical fiction based on remarkable true lives, richly evoked settings and stories of resilience, ingenuity and ordinary people achieving extraordinary things, then When the Stones Held is certainly one to add to your reading list.
Pick up your copy HERE.
David E. Owen
After decades spent teaching around the world—from the UK to the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East—I came to writing fiction later in life. I started with fantasy before finding my voice in fast-paced, real-world spy thrillers. My stories are grounded in current issues like corruption, gender bias, and power, but always emphasise pace, surprise, and character-driven tension.
I’ve visited over 80 countries, worked as a radio host in Abu Dhabi, directed Shakespeare for African audiences in the bush, and even survived a flash flood in Mali and an armed hold-up. I was arrested for drug-smuggling in Nigeria but was eventually released when I refused to pay off the police captain, and I was boat-wrecked alone on a desert island in the Arabian Sea (but no tree) and rescued through a police search. Now retired from teaching, I split my time between writing, photography, and trying to get fit (thanks to a stubborn rowing machine). My latest novel, Hate Machine, tackles misogyny and gender radicalisation — not typical thriller territory, but I like a challenge.
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