PGW(C)31(FLT)

Golden Grove  

II  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Flintshire  

Llanasa  

308821  

381538  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Terraced garden with topiary; walled garden  

Seventeenth century, late nineteenth to early twentieth century  

Golden Grove, a sixteenth or seventeenth-century stone house, is located a short distance to the south-east of Prestatyn. Its grounds are registered for the historical interest of their Edwardian terraced garden featuring Yew topiary, for the remains of a seventeenth-century walled garden, and for the historical association with Lady Aberconwy, the daughter of Henry Pochin of Bodnant. The grounds are important for their group value with Grade I listed Golden Grove House (LB 301), and with a range of Grade II listed structures: the entrance lodge, upper and lower terrace steps, the barn, of possible seventeenth-century date, greenhouse in vegetable garden, and the exceptionally early, sixteenth-century, sundial. There is also a Scheduled prehistoric barrow on high ground north-west of the house. The house is approached from the south-east at an entrance and lodge (LB 25122) on the Prestatyn-Llanasa road. The drive, lined with a sycamore avenue, passes a large field known as the park to the forecourt. A secondary drive once branched off to the stables. Aside from the avenue the trees here are a small clump of beech, woodland belts east of the drive and mixed woodland along the road. North of the house a track through Home Wood, mixed woodland, leads to St Elmo's Summerhouse, a low mound on top of the ridge (SAM FL113). The wooden summerhouse here has gone. The outer ditch and bank are part of a denuded Bronze Age barrow (SAM FL113, nprn 306727), and the masonry remains in the centre are probably part of a wartime lookout. The gardens lie to the south and below the house, laid out as three terraces leading down from the forecourt to the walled garden which contains both pleasure garden and kitchen garden, a layout created by Lady Aberconwy after 1877. The terraces were constructed from old farm buildings which were sited just below the terrace area on the line of the service drive and are accessed by flights of steps (LBs 25120-1). Mown grass lawns surround the drive sweep on the south front of the house, and narrow flower beds lie immediately under the south front of the house. There is a sundial near the south-west corner of the house (LB 302). The walled garden below the terraces probably dates to the seventeenth century, its north wall partly removed with the building of the terraces. This part of the garden is divided into three sections by yew hedging. The largest is the central area which has an axial path running north-south, flanked by grass lawns containing rectangular rose beds. The western section is used as a vegetable garden and contains a listed green house (LB 25132), the eastern part a planted nuttery with a small arbour at the southern end. The southern boundary has been extended by the building of a low stone wall with a central semi-circular bay in front of which is a rectangular raised pond. Immediately south of the walled garden is an orchard. Setting - Golden Grove grounds occupy the south-facing slope of an east-west ridge between the house and the sea and extend to the highest point of the ridge. Significant views – the location of the house high on the ridge affords fine views across the park and the countryside beyond. Source: Cadw 1995: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Clwyd, 92-4 (ref: PGW(C)31).