A YOUNG Victorian woman sets off on a treacherous trip across Europe in pursuit of her beloved brother Roger, an officer serving in the Crimea.

In doing so she becomes one of the first women to visit the battlefield at Balaclava and the first to ride up the dangerous road to the batteries overlooking Sevastopol.

It sounds like the stuff of romantic fiction, but is in fact one of the many remarkable true stories from the short but adventurous life of Ellen Palmer, a young woman who lived at Cefn Park, a beautiful stately home on the outskirts of Wrexham.

From the age of 17, Ellen kept a series of diaries which were only discovered in 1989 by her descendents who still live at Cefn Park and now thanks to 90-year-old Dame Gillian Wagner – the great granddaughter of Ellen – they have been transcribed and published in a new book entitled Miss Palmer’s Diary – The Secret Journals of a Victorian Lady.

“No one really knew anything about Ellen,” says Gillian. “There was a lovely portrait of herm, but then there were these three locked diaries which had slipped behind a piece of furniture in the billiards room and my brother Roger had them unlocked and I started to read them.

“I soon realised there was a loot of interesting stuff there, but it took me a very long time to sort out what was and wasn’t worth reading.

“It’s fairly remarkable – they run from 1847 to 1855 without a break. Every day it’s all there from who she met to how she had her hair done.

“All sorts of little details – you don’t usually find in memoirs and because she’s young you get a very unique take on society life.”

Ellen Palmer was born in 1829 and her short life had much in common with some famous fictional heroines of her time, including Thackeray’s Becky Sharpe and Austen’s Emma Woodhouse, and was equally dramatic.

Her family owned country estates in Cefn and near Dublin in Ireland as well as owning extensive lands in County Mayo and a large London house in Portland Place.

But the family hid a secret… her father suffered from both epilepsy and mental illness and his inability to manage his estate meant Ellen was called into action when her mother died in 1852.

“The Palmer family’s rise up the social ladder was extremely interesting,” says Gillian.

“I think because of her father and the stigma involved they weren’t accepted at the top rank of society and they desperately wanted to be.

“Their efforts to climb the ladder and the snubs they encountered were fascinating.”

When she began her diaries, Ellen was eager to experience the world of balls, opera visits and dinner parties which were a rite of passage for a woman of her class, but after a fateful encounter with a duplicitous Swedish count, her marriage prospects were dealt a heavy blow.

“She was bowled over by this rotten Swedish count,” laughs Gillian. “She loved him so much she couldn’t see it.

“She was two or three generations before the suffragettes, but she had very strong views on marriage and didn’t believe a woman should be subordinate to her husband just because he was a man.

“When she found love with her husband Archie she made him promise to never boss her around - she was very much ahead of her time in terms of women’s rights.”

The most extraordinary episode in Ellen’s life came when she decided to pack up her family, complete with servants, and make the long trip to the Crimea in the hope of persuading her beloved brother Roger to leave the army.

“She was the first lady to visit the Crimea,” says Gillian. “Her primary object was to persuade her brother to leave the army, but she also wanted to be there in case he was injured.

“They travelled down the Rhine and the Danube and then travelled in carts. It was incredibly dangerous but she sat in the front with a pistol drawn as they raced along.

“It was incredibly unusual and when she got there the embassy was astonished she’d managed it.”

Ellen’s view of the war was told with calm detachment and her words give some insight into her priorities.

One entry read: “Tuesday (January) 9. A powder ship with 700 tons on board caught fire this morning and was very near exploding close to us, in which case every soul in the harbour would have been blown to pieces. Visitors all day. Lord F. Paulet, Major Taylor, Captain Peel and his cousin dined here.”

Two days later, she wrote that her clothes had somehow caught fire, leaving her with a dress “burnt in holes”.

In between are accounts of dinners, dances and parties, Ellen also had an eye for the conflict going on around her, and she was not blind to the plight of the working class soldiers.

On one cold January day, she mentioned lunching in her brother’s tent, but commented: “It is still freezing hard and the ground is almost too slippery to walk upon. They are beginning to build wooden huts for the soldiers at last.”

She also visited several of the battlegrounds themselves, only a short time after the fighting had stopped, sometimes risking attack from Russian forces waiting to fire on their enemies.

She wrote: “We saw numbers of horses lying about both dead and dying, it is really heartbreaking to look at the poor brutes suffering such agonies.

“The men died of the cold in the trenches last night.”

Gillian says: “I don’t know if she was a terribly nice person, but I certainly grew to admire her.

“She says when she is 18 ‘I know that I will astonish the world someday’ – she never did poor love because she died aged 33. but I think she would have done.”

Even if the Charge of the Light Brigade was a disaster, Ellen’s own mission was a success.

She met one Archibald Peel, nephew of Robert Peel who set up Britain’s first real police force, returned to Britain and married him.

She bore him four children before dying in childbirth, aged 34.

“I don’t know if she was a terribly nice person but I certainly grew to admire her,” says Gillian, who has been chairman of Barnardo’s and the Carnegie UK Trust.

Transcribing and writing her book took Gillian 12 years as she grappled with using a laptop and on one occasion managing to delete the majority of her notes.

But now the book has been published and launched with a recent event at Cefn Park she is proud she has managed to tell the story of a remarkable woman.

“I was a beginner with laptops and at one point I lost six months work and that put me back a bit,” adds Gillian.

“But I was doing it just for me and not for a publisher and I really miss her now I’ve finished.

“My grandmother frequently remarked how much she regretted never knowing her mother. If only those locked diaries, lying unnoticed among the game books and miscellaneous household accounts so carefully stored at Cefn, had been found earlier she would have known what a remarkable person her mother had been.”

l Miss Palmer’s Diary – The Secret Journals of a Victorian Lady by Gilliam Wagner is published by I.B. Tauris