William Cathrall

William Cathrall was a 19th-century British historical writer whose surviving books show a strong interest in place, landscape, and local memory. He is credited as the author and compiler of The History of North Wales (1828), a wide-ranging work covering several Welsh counties along with historical and biographical notes.

He is also known for The History of Oswestry (1855), where he described the project in the preface as something he took on after being called to Oswestry on commercial business. That book ranges far beyond a simple town chronicle, bringing together the borough's British, Saxon, Norman, and English past with sections on topography, church and civic life, botany, geology, statistics, angling, and local biography.

Even where biographical details about Cathrall himself are hard to pin down, his writing makes his interests clear: he liked assembling scattered facts, preserving regional history, and giving readers a vivid sense of a place and its past. For listeners drawn to local history, antiquarian detail, and the border country between England and Wales, his work offers a window into how the 1800s looked back on earlier centuries.