Aberglasney House

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Aberglasney House, view from the Upper Walled Garden

Aberglasney House ( Welsh Aberglasne ) is a manor house in Wales . The manor house is about 6 km west of Llandeilo on the edge of the small village of Llangathen above the valley of the Afon Tywi in Carmarthenshire . It is classified as a Grade II * cultural monument . The Royal Horticultural Society listed the surrounding garden as one of the top ten formal gardens in the UK in 2015 .

history

The manor had belonged to the Welsh family Thomas since the 15th century at the latest. In a Welsh poem written in the late 15th century, the bard Lewis Glyn Cothi praised the nine green gardens of Aberglasney, but there is no other information about what the house looked like or exactly where it was. In the 16th century it belonged to Sir William Thomas . His descendants sold the property to Anthony Rudd after he became Bishop of St Davids in 1594. Rudd probably had the old house demolished and began building a new mansion and landscaping the surrounding garden. After Anthony Rudd's death in 1615, his son and heir Sir Rice Rudd continued to expand the house and the gardens. The property remained in the possession of the Rudd family until the heavily indebted property had to be sold after the death of Rice Rudd, 2nd Baronet in 1701.

View of the cloister garden and part of the south wing

In 1710 the lawyer Robert Dyer from Kidwelly bought the property, who undertook major renovations and new buildings. Among other things, he rebuilt the north wing in the Queen Anne style. At that time, the mansion consisted of the north and west wings and an economic wing in the east. To the north was a forecourt surrounded by farm buildings with a gatehouse. Around 1781 the north wing was rebuilt to create a large entrance hall. The east wing was also redesigned, and the construction of a two-story south wing created a four-wing complex around a small inner courtyard. Due to high debts, William Herbert Dyer had to sell the property with over 236 hectares of land to Thomas Philipps for 10,000 guineas in 1803  . Philipps had served as a doctor in the service of the British East India Company in India for 32 years and bought Aberglasney as a retirement home. For this, he again had various conversions carried out in the house and in the garden. After his death in 1824, his nephew John Walters Philipps inherited the house. Around 1840 he had the south wing extended and its exterior adapted to the other parts of the building. Around this time the north wing received a portico . Around 1850, Philipps had the west wing rebuilt by the architect Edward Haycock from Shrewsbury . After Philip's death, the property was mostly rented out to his granddaughter Marianne Mayhew from 1872 onwards before she moved into it herself from 1902 onwards. After her husband's death in 1908, however, she moved back to London and only visited Aberglasney occasionally. After her own death in 1939, the house was confiscated by the army during World War II. After that, it changed hands several times, with the majority of the associated land ownership being sold separately from 1954. A restoration of the neglected house that began in the 1970s was canceled. In the 1980s, the portico on the north facade was demolished and sold, although the house had been a listed building since 1951. However, the parts could later be bought back. The building was badly damaged by fire and vandalism. The house was on the verge of total ruin when it was acquired by the Aberglasney Restoration Trust in 1995 with the help of a donation from the American Frank Cabot . After extensive archaeological investigations, the house and garden were gradually restored from 1998 with the help of further donations and state funding. The gardens have been open to the public since July 4th, 1999 and the gardens have been expanded to include additional facilities. The BBC reported on the restoration in the four-part film series A Garden lost in Time . The ground floor of the manor house, which has been used as an exhibition area and for events since then, was restored by spring 2013.

investment

Exterior

View of the mansion from the east

The four-winged mansion around a small inner courtyard is brightly plastered and mainly in the Queen Anne style of the early 18th century with alterations in the style of the late Georgian style . The house consists of three three-story wings and the two-story south wing. The buildings have flat slate roofs, with the west and east facade being emphasized on the sides by side gables. The symmetrical north wing, built after 1710, has a portico with Ionic columns . The core of the west and east wings date from the 17th century. The windows of the west facade facing the garden are arranged asymmetrically, on the sides it has rustified , but plastered masonry. A two-storey bay window is placed in front of the gabled end of the north wing on the west facade, and the end of the south wing is also gabled. In addition, the west facade is loosened up by a three-arched loggia on the ground floor, which comes from the renovation around 1850. The south wing, which was substantially rebuilt around 1800 and contained utility rooms, is only two-story. Around 1840 it was extended by two three-story extensions so that it is as high at the ends as the other wings. The east wing facing the slope has three floors and, like the west wing, is gabled at both ends. The windows of this facade are arranged irregularly.

Interior

Little of the building's interior has been preserved due to the fire and decay at the end of the 20th century. The stucco ceiling of the two-storey entrance hall in the north wing was restored according to old photographs. A door leads from the hall into the double staircase. The badly damaged south wing was not rebuilt, but covered with a glass roof together with the inner courtyard. The space created in this way has served as a subtropical garden space since 2005. This was named Ninfarium after the Italian village of Ninfa at the foot of the Monti Lepini , which has been imaginatively planted since the 20th century.

The garden

The mansion is surrounded by a four-hectare garden, which is mainly composed of a sequence of formal garden spaces to the west and south of the house. In addition to the restored historic gardens, there are other gardens created by the Aberglasney Restoration Trust.

The north and west wings of the manor house, in the foreground the ruins of the gatehouse

Driveway and northern meadow

The main entrance to the facility leads across a meadow that was created in the 19th century. The old farm buildings from the 17th and 18th centuries were demolished for this purpose. Only the two-story ruin of the gatehouse was left standing as a folly . Next to it is a 20 meter long yew tunnel , which was probably originally created as a hedge in the early 18th century. Sprouts from the trees were placed in the ground in a second row in the shape of an arch, where they would sprout again. The yew trees thus form a natural tunnel, which was mentioned as early as 1861.

Cloister garden

The most important part of the garden is the rectangular cloister garden, surrounded on three sides by a stone archway, which got its name because of its resemblance to the cloister of a monastery. Of this archway, however, only the west side is laid out as an open arcade, while there are wall niches on the north and south sides. The open eastern side borders the terrace of the manor house. There is a small pavilion at the southeast corner of the archway, and the gardener's house, which was built in the early 19th century and now serves as a café, is located at the northeast corner. Today the inner courtyard is laid out as a geometrically laid out lawn on the ground floor with boxwood cones. In 1999 it was still assumed that the garden was only laid out around 1770. However, the archaeological investigations revealed that the garden was originally laid out around 1600. The Cloister Garden is the only surviving Elizabethan-era garden of its kind in Britain.

The arcade of the cloister garden

Other historical parts of the garden

To the west of the cloister garden is the walled pool garden with a large, artificial pond, which was originally created as a fish pond at the beginning of the 17th century and was later converted into an ornamental pond. To the south of the cloister garden is the upper walled garden. Originally also laid out in the 17th century, it was redesigned in 1998 by the garden architect Penelope Hobhouse as a symmetrically laid out formal garden with flower beds with boxwood borders and cones. It consists of concentrically arranged, boxwood-lined beds, which enclose an oval lawn in the middle. The beds are planted with perennials that repeat themselves rhythmically and are bordered at the ends with laurel-leaved viburnum bushes . A passage leads from the walled garden to the walled kitchen garden , which since the restoration partly serves as a kitchen garden, but also as a flower garden. To the north-west of the gardens are the former farm buildings and the former home of the administrator, which were built around a rectangular courtyard in the 19th century and are protected as Grade II architectural monuments. In the courtyard of the farm buildings, the Sunken Garden was laid out with flower beds, paved areas and a round pond with a hemispherical fountain sculpture by William Pye .

The historic gardens are surrounded by an English landscape garden. In the east there is a forest with natural plantings, to the west of the house the Bishop Rudd's Walk leads into a flat valley with a stream, wooded with ash, holly and yew trees. In addition to the gardens with native trees and plants, there is an Asian garden on a small hill near the house with plants from China, Japan, Nepal and other parts of Asia. To the south of the house there are old bird houses, behind which an alpine garden with dwarf plants was created. The Jubilee Woodland was opened in 2012 for the diamond jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II .

literature

  • Blockley, Kevin, Halfpenny, Ian (Eds.): Aberglasney House and Gardens: Archeology, History and Architecture . Archaeopress, Oxford 2002, ISBN 1-84171-409-7
  • Penny David: A Garden Lost In Time: Mystery of the Ancient Gardens of Aberglasney . Seven Dials, London 1999, ISBN 0-297-82484-8

Web links

Commons : Aberglasney House  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ RHS: Beautiful open Gardens: ABERGLASNEY GARDENS. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 7, 2016 ; accessed on February 17, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / press.rhs.org.uk
  2. ^ Francis Jones: Aberglasney and its Families. In: National Library of Wales Journal, 1979, p. 6
  3. ^ Archives Wales: Evans (Aberglasney) Documents. Retrieved February 17, 2017 .
  4. ↑ Blockley, Kevin, Halfpenny, Ian (Eds.): Aberglasney House and Gardens: Archeology, History and Architecture . Archaeopress, Oxford 2002, ISBN 1-84171-409-7 , p. 5
  5. ↑ Aberglasney: Ninfarium. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 27, 2017 ; accessed on February 17, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / aberglasney.org
  6. ↑ Blockley, Kevin, Halfpenny, Ian (Eds.): Aberglasney House and Gardens: Archeology, History and Architecture . Archaeopress, Oxford 2002, ISBN 1-84171-409-7 , p. 2
  7. ↑ Briggs, CS, Aberglasney: The theory, history and archeology of a post-medieval landscape. In: Post-Medieval Archeology 33, 1999, pp. 257-258
  8. ↑ Blockley, Kevin, Halfpenny, Ian (Eds.): Aberglasney House and Gardens: Archeology, History and Architecture . Archaeopress, Oxford 2002, ISBN 1-84171-409-7 , p. 6
  9. ↑ RHS: Beautiful open Gardens: ABERGLASNEY GARDENS. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 7, 2016 ; accessed on February 17, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / press.rhs.org.uk
  10. ↑ Patrick Taylor: English Gardens: Landscape Parks and Cottage Gardens in Great Britain and Ireland. Dorling Kindersley, Starnberg 2005, ISBN 3-8310-0781-0 , p. 189
  11. ^ Lodge to Aberglasney, including stone archways into courtyard, Llangathen, S. Retrieved February 17, 2017 .
  12. ↑ Patrick Taylor: English Gardens: Landscape Parks and Cottage Gardens in Great Britain and Ireland. Dorling Kindersley, Starnberg 2005, ISBN 3-8310-0781-0 , p. 189

Coordinates: 51 ° 52 '45.5 "  N , 4 ° 3' 40.3"  W.