PGW(Gt)25(TOR)

Llantarnam Abbey  

II  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Torfaen  

Llantarnam  

331033  

192864  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Landscape park, formal garden, informal garden, walled kitchen garden.  

1836-7; c. 1905  

Registered for the survival of a landscape park, formal and informal gardens and kitchen garden dating to the 1830s. The garden also incorporates statues thought to be of seventeenth-century date. The registered area shares important group value with the associated estate buildings and structures of similar date. Llantarnam Abbey (LB: 85246) stands on the site of a medieval Cistercian monastery (founded 1179). The house was built in the mid-sixteenth-century on the same site following the Dissolution, using abbey materials. There may have been a hunting park here in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, but the present park, along with its gardens, was made in 1836-7, when T.H Wyatt remodelled the house for Reginald Blewitt. The park lies between the Afon Lwyd on the north and the Pen-y-Parc road on the ridge to the south of the Dowlais Brook on the south. Between the two brooks the ground is level and low-lying. To the south of the Dowlais Brook the ground rises to a higher, rolling plateau. A high stone wall was built along the Newport Road and extended along the Pen-y-Parc road, the south boundary of the park. The park is now divided by the A4042. The entrance arch and lodge off the Newport road, the Magna Porta (LB: 81871) was built in a similar style to that of the house (Victorian Tudor). The winding drive was constructed along the south side of the Dowlais Brook, with flanking planting of deciduous trees and evergreen shrub understorey. It crosses the brook over a single arch bridge (LB: 81860) to approach the west side of the house. In the 1880s an avenue ran north-south to the north of Pen-y-parc, between the road and the belt of woodland along the Dowlais Brook. Aligned on the south front of the house, and visible from it on rising ground beyond the brook, there is now no trace of it. A large stone statue known as 'Robin Hood' (now at Glen Usk) originally stood in this part of the park. Scots pines were planted to the north of the house, to the south of the Afon Lwyd. The rest of the park is otherwise open pasture with isolated trees. The gardens lie to the south, east and west of the house. A large walled kitchen garden lies immediately east of the stables courtyard. The structure, some of the layout, and some of the planting of the gardens survive. To the west of the house the drive enters the rectangular forecourt under a Gothic archway (LB: 81867). The garden on the west and south is enclosed by a low stone wall and outer dry moat with bastions in the south-west and south-east corners (LB: 81868) each supporting a life-sized stone statue thought to be of seventeenth-century date (LB: 81874) and with low decorative cast iron gates in the middle of each side. Further smaller statues survived here at least until the early twentieth-century. The formal layout of paths in the garden has gone, except the central path, as has a fountain originally in the middle of the garden on the south side. A wellingtonia flanking the central path survives. A conservatory on the south side of the stable court, present in 1946, has now gone. Beyond the enclosed garden area (south and east of the kitchen garden) was the informal part of the pleasure garden, the shrubbery and an area with walks and a small lake. Some specimen trees remain here. A picturesque pavilion with a turret called the 'Monk's Cell' (LB: 81873) survives on the north side of the lake. The lake has since been drained and filled in to form a grass field, a disused stone fountain of a scallop shell held up by dolphins marooned in the middle. Further north was a maze, also now gone. To the south of the 'Monk's Cell' are the remains of a grotto, said to have had tunnels, which became, in the early twentieth century, the repository of remains of monks’ tombs. A life-sized stone figure of a praying monk from within it is now in the kitchen garden The walled garden (LB: 81872) is a large parallelogram in shape, long axis north-east/south-west and is surrounded by intact stone walls. There are entrances on the north, south and east sides. The garden is divided in two lengthwise by a cross wall; the southern, larger, area is partly an orchard, partly a recently-built circular maze; the northern half is retained for vegetables and glasshouses. Along the outside of the north and east sides of the garden are brick lean-to sheds. An early to mid- nineteenth century gardener’s cottage is attached to the east end of the south wall. Sources: Cadw 1994: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales: Gwent, 80-82 (ref: PGW (Gt)25). Ordnance Survey first-edition six-inch map: sheet Monmouthshire XXVIII (1872); third edition 25-inch map: sheet Monmouthshire XXVII.4 (1916).