PGW(Dy)52(CER)

Nanteos  

II*  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Ceredigion  

Trawsgoed  

262055  

278395  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Landscape park; informal garden & grounds; walled kitchen garden.  

1739-57; 1757-80; 1830-54  

Registered as the well-preserved grounds and landscape park, which together with the house and outbuildings form one of the most important survivals of a grand Georgian estate in Wales. The natural landscape is beautiful and has been well exploited by the design of the landscape park and pleasure grounds to form a very attractive setting to the house. The registered park and garden shares important group value with the grade I listed house (LB: 9875) and its associated estate buildings and structures. Nanteos is one of the most important eighteenth-century houses in west Wales. It is set in a medium-sized landscape park situated in the Nant Paith valley and the rising ground to its south, where the park is bounded by the B4340 Aberystwyth to New Cross road. The Nant Eos (stream of the nightingale) of the name of the house is a small stream which rises south of Moriah, to the north of the house and runs southwards through Black Covert towards the grounds. The view southwards from the house and garden across the park is a very attractive one. The main approach to the house is via a long drive up the valley from the west, the entrance flanked by low stone walls and an Italianate lodge (built 1857) on the north side (LB: 82509). The drive leads south-eastwards along the valley floor, then north-east to the house. A number of tracks to the north of the drive, and north and east of the house, are relict drives and a former public road. The main area of the park lies to the south, south-east and south-west of the house, and is bounded by belts of woodland on the north, west, and much of the east and south sides. The open, unfenced grassland of the park is broken by informal belts of woodland and clumps. Prominent on and below the skyline in the south-east part are five beech clumps and the beech woodland of Coed Tyn-y-cwm. Running up the slope in the middle of the park is Target Covert. To its west is a ruined stone building, a classical eye-catcher, once a prominent feature in the park (scheduled monument CD205). It dates to between 1764 and 1780 and was built by the Revd Dr William Powell as part of a major landscaping scheme. Its north façade was clearly intended to be seen from the house as an eye-catcher; it was ornamented with two blank Venetian windows, parts of which remain. From it there would have been fine views towards the house and down the Nant Paith valley to Pendinas and the sea. The eye-catcher was used as dog kennels. Below Rookery Wood, in the west of the park, is the lake. Roughly oval in shape with an island, it is fed from its east end by a channel off the Nant Paith, originally with a weir and a cascade below it. This has now been washed away, but a sketch of it in 1874, by W.T.R. Powell, shows that it was adorned with stonework topped with chunks of quartz. The lake is dammed by a large earth bank on its west side, with sluices and stone-lined overflow channels near its north and south ends. It is not known how the environs of the earlier house on the site were laid out. The first evidence for an ornamental layout is the first survey of Nanteos, dated 1764, by John Davies. This was carried out for the Revd Dr William Powell and probably shows the layout of his predecessor, Thomas Powell, who had built the house in 1739-57. The Revd Dr William Powell (died 1780) is thought to have undertaken the next major phase of landscaping by having the public road in front of the house closed and a replacement, turnpike road, built along the line of the present B4340, south of the woodland. This opened up the whole of the intervening area, between the house and the road, for use as parkland. Within this extended area the Revd Powell built the classical eye-catcher as an adornment for his new park. The following owner, Thomas Powell (died 1797) appears not to have made any significant changes, although some were contemplated during his lifetime. When William Edward Powell inherited in 1809 the estate was deeply in debt. This did not prevent him carrying out improvements, especially from 1814 onwards. In this year John Edwards of Rheola (Glamorgan), a cousin of the architect John Nash, was appointed steward at Nanteos. Between 1814 and 1817 plans and drawings for picturesque buildings in the park and grounds were produced by George Repton, in Nash’s office, but the scheme was abandoned in 1817. A survey of the estate in 1818 shows that by that date the park had taken on much of its present-day layout. When William Edward Powell moved in to Nanteos in 1830 he commissioned a survey by his new agent, Thomas Griffiths. This plan, with amendments on it up to 1835, shows a few further changes. The 1886 Ordnance Survey map shows that the overall configuration of the landscape remained the same as before and was much as it is today. The pleasure grounds lie to the south, south-east and west of the house, occupying an elongated area on rising ground above the floor of the valley. The development of the grounds around the house went hand in hand with that of the park. The layout shown in a survey of 1818, with some of its nineteenth-century planting, has survived to the present day. The grounds fall into three distinct areas. To the south of the forecourt and drive is a lawn, partly a disused croquet lawn, sloping gently down to the park boundary. It is divided from the park by a ha-ha and fence, beyond which open grassland falling gently to the Nant Paith which is canalised to the south of the house. To the south-east of the house is a further lawn, known as the shrubbery, informally planted with fine specimen trees including cedar of Lebanon and Ginkgo biloba, backed on the north by the kitchen garden and on the south by the ha-ha. Near the north-west corner is an oval mound, topped by two large fallen mulberry trees, with pets’ gravestones set upright around its edge. The stones are not in their original positions and were once scattered throughout the shrubbery. A former path, which winds through the area, is visible in the turf. The third area lies to the west of the house and is a long strip of ornamental woodland between the present drive and the old drive above it. Between the two is an unsurfaced, contoured walk, Lovers’ Walk, which runs from the east edge of the wood, just to the west of the house, almost as far as the lodge. A branch drops down to the drive opposite the lake. The woodland is mostly beech, oak and sycamore, with an understorey of laurel, Portugal laurel, rhododendron, box and a few flowering shrubs. Notable mature trees flanking the walk include common limes, small-leaved limes, sweet chestnut, Douglas fir, and wellingtonia. The kitchen garden (LB: 82521) is located to the immediate east of the house, within the pleasure grounds that surround it. It is a large, walled, rectilinear area, long axis roughly east by west, sloping down from north to south. The walls date from 1814-17 though it was preceded by an earlier, unwalled, kitchen garden. The walls are of brick and rubble stone construction and mostly still intact, rising to 4m on the east, 4.5m on the north but falling to 3m at its east end (partly derelict), and 3.5m high on the south. The north wall is of stone lined with brick on the inside. There are entrances, some blocked, in all four walls. The interior of the garden is grassed over and there are no obvious remains of the former path layout though traces are visible from the air. Buildings there appear to have been mostly removed in recent years. In the centre there were two derelict glasshouses, one above the other. The upper one was a vinery with a wooden superstructure on a brick base, with vine arches, accessed by a flight of steps on the west side. Against the north side were some ruined, roofless, stone bothies. The lower glasshouse had no superstructure remaining. It was built against a brick wall, behind it a furnace/boiler pit. Nearby was a circular, stone-lined pool, about 2.5m in diameter, with an iron fountain pipe in the middle; a row of brick frames; a melon house; and a roofless, ruined bothy range of rubble stone. It is unclear as to what extent these features now survive. Significant Views: Wide, open views to the south, southeast and southwest from the house and gardens across the park. The open grassland east of The Rookery continues up the slope beyond the park to the skyline, where it is flanked by more woodland on the west and Coed Cwmhwylog on the east. This is an important extension of the view of the park from the house, the woodlands on either side of the central open area cleverly framing it all the way up to the skyline. Sources: Cadw 2002: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, 86, 89-90 (ref: PGW(Dy)47(CER)). Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, sheet: Cardiganshire X.NW & X.NE (1886).