22608

 

II  

Designated  

04/11/1999  

04/11/1999  

East range of farm buildings at Tan-y-bwlch  

 

Gwynedd  

Mawddwy  

 

Dinas Mawddwy  

286312  

314921  

 

The square farmyard for Tan-y-bwlch, stands apart and approximately 80m to the N of the farmhouse.  

Agriculture and Subsistence  

 

The earlier farmhouse at Tan-y-bwlch became the home farm for the Buckley estate at Dinas Mawddwy from the later 1860s. Edmund Peck (Buckley), illegitimate son of a wealthy Manchester business man, planned to develop the area with appropriate industries, building a fine Romantic Elizabethan house, Plas Dinas, and shortly after, workers cottages, a hotel, and his home farm, his architect being James Stephens of Manchester. The new planned square of farm buildings he undertook entirely in in-situ concrete construction, a new material which was being pioneered at about the same time by Lord Sudely at Gregynog, Powys. When the estate was sold in 1878, the farmbuildings were partly completed and comprised 'stalls for 13 oxen and for a like number of young cattle; calf kits, engine and boiler room, machine house and cutting room, loose box with granary and hay and straw lofts over'. The concrete used here is a no-fines concrete using slate quarry waste, presumably from Buckley's own quarry, as an aggregate, cast between shutters in lifts of some 60cm, and without provision for linear movement. The walls are of a consistent 230-250mm thickness throughout. There is no indication of rendering internally or externally, but they may once have been limewashed.  

The farmyard is about 40m square, with long ranges on the E, N and W sides, and an open cartshed partly closing the S side. The E range consists, from right to left, of a store and granary over, with a gabled loft door, a 3-bay barn, a 3-narrower bay workshop to shafting, and, at the N end, a 4 bay cowhouse, open internally at the corner to the cowhouse range along the N side. The barn has full-height doors to the central winnowing floor and ventilation slits each side. The workshop section has a stable door and two windows to the ground floor, and windows to the loft, and the cowhouse has two similar doors and square ventilation windows, one bay of which is now a workshop.  

The barn has two shouldered king strut trusses with angled struts, carrying principals and two tiers of purlins. The concrete walls are left exposed both internally and externally.  

Included as a part of a well-planned mid-later C19 estate farmyard, and one of special interest where in-situ concrete has been used for the whole construction; a very early example of the successful and long lasting use of this technique.