Ceredigion from Cardigan, between five and six thousand leaving the town between 1790 and 1860. Aberystwyth became the main centre for the export of lead and Aberaeron and Newquay did brisk coastal trade. The building of the railway from Shrewsbury in the 1860s encouraged visitors and hotels sprang up in the town to accommodate them. This area of the county of Dyfed became a district of Wales under the name Ceredigion in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972, and since 1996, has formed the county of Ceredigion. According to the 2001 census, Ceredigion has the fourth highest proportion of Welsh
Welsh language to under 50 per cent in Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire for the first time. However, according to the Welsh Language Use Survey in 2013–15, 24 per cent of people aged three and over were able to speak Welsh. In 2018 a survey by the ONS suggested 29.3 per cent of the population of Wales were able to speak the language. Historically, large numbers of Welsh people spoke only Welsh. Over the course of the 20th century this monolingual population "all but disappeared", but a small percentage remained at the time of the 1981 census. Most Welsh-speaking people in Wales also speak