What wood are Welsh dressers made from?

Oak, overwhelmingly. It appears in 354 of the 475 titles in the archive, which makes everything else read as an exception. Pine is the clear minority and covers stripped, scumbled and painted pieces. Beyond those two, elm, yew, fruitwood, ash, walnut, cherrywood, maple and Scots pine each show up once or twice, and mahogany usually turns up as inlay or crossbanding rather than the carcass.

Why are so many listed as dresser bases only?

Bases without racks are a standing part of this market. Thirty-nine titles say 'base', and they appear at the very top of the range and the very bottom. A base alone works as a sideboard, which keeps demand for them steady. Racks also get listed on their own, so the two halves circulate separately.

How reliable is the date on a Welsh dresser listing?

It is a period judgement more than a document. '18th Century' and '19th Century' together outnumber every precise entry, and 'Georgian', '1800s' and 'Victorian' are broad labels too. Only 109 of 475 listings give a clean year, spread from 1700 to 1930. Precise decades are thin on the ground: the 1750s, 1910s, 1920s and 1850s each account for a handful.

Are all dressers in this category actually Welsh?

The heading is dominated by Welsh pieces, and regional attribution is a habit of the category, with Anglesey leading and Snowdonia close behind. Alongside them the archive carries English, Shropshire and West Country dressers, plus French, Danish and American examples filed here. Where a title names a Welsh county or district, that is the dealer's attribution and nothing more detailed than the place name.

What is a potboard dresser?

One with an open base standing on legs, with a low shelf running between them close to the floor. That shelf is the potboard, written as one word or two in titles. The form accounts for somewhere between a tenth and a sixth of titles, and it concentrates in the upper half of the range, especially the 18th-century oak examples.

Who made antique Welsh dressers?

Country joiners working in local timbers, and no further than that. A scan of all 475 listings returned no maker names or workshops at all. So attribution in this category runs by place rather than person. A title may pin a piece to Anglesey, Snowdonia, Montgomeryshire or the Swansea Valley, but the name of the hand behind it goes unrecorded.