History
Although it was never completed and has been ruinous for over a hundred and fifty years, Foxhall Newydd nevertheless ranks as one of the most ambitious and sophisticated projects of Elizabethan house building in Wales. The house was begun in 1592 by John Panton, Recorder of Denbigh and (more significantly) Chief Secretary to the Lord Keeper. In the latter post Panton occupied a position of considerable power and influence and, based at York House in the Strand, was well-placed to tap the rich source of perquisites and bribes available to senior court officials. In building Foxhall Newydd outside his native Denbigh, Panton was making a calculated statement to his peers about his new-found wealth and success, much in the same way that Sir John Trevor, a decade later, was to do when he built his own statement house, Plas Teg, in his native Flintshire. In fact Plas Teg is the closest parallel for Foxhall Newydd outside England, for both are products of the Serlian court-circle architecture promoted by Smythson, Thorpe and their contemporaries.
The house appears to have been planned as a symmetrical H-plan house which, had it been built, would have been three times the size of the surviving section. It appears however that Panton ran (unsurprisingly) into financial difficulties and ultimately only the left-hand cross-wing was completed. The finished section was, however, fully fitted out and inhabited, as shown by the surviving internal plasterwork, as well as the dovecote and formal garden layout, evidence for which has recently been identified. The house is said to have been abandoned at the end of the C18 and by the end of the C19 was already ruinous.
Of particular interest is that the new house was not built on a fresh site, since it abuts the ruins of a storeyed single-end chimney house of probable mid C16 date. It appears that the primary house was to have been swept away when the central range was built, though was retained, perhaps as a service wing or lodgings block, when building work was suspended. A curious juxtaposition therefore exists, with the ruins of the mid-Tudor vernacular storeyed house dwarfed by the towering late Elizabethan cross-wing built up against it.