The National Monuments Record of Wales (NMRW) is the national collection of information about the historic environment of Wales from the earliest cave dwellings to 21st-century windfarms. It includes over 1.7 million photographs and many thousands of drawings, surveys, reports and maps. The archive grows daily as information is gathered directly through the Royal Commission’s research and survey programmes and from donations of material from other organisations and private individuals.
The archive can be accessed through Coflein or by contacting our enquiry service. This public information service draws on both archival and published sources and specialist advice from Royal Commission staff.
Coflein is the Royal Commission’s public online database. It combines information about archaeological sites and buildings of all periods with catalogue information about the NMRW archive collections.
Increasingly, archives can be viewed and downloaded directly from Coflein.
A public online portal, Historic Wales is being developed to enable searching across databases created by other organisations in Wales concerned with aspects of the historic environment. At present, CARN (Core Archaeological Record iNdex) is the public entry-point to the Extended National Database compiled by archaeological organisations across Wales.
