PGW(Gd)3(CON)

Bryn-y-Neuadd  

II  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Gwynedd  

Llanfairfechan  

267548  

374551  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Mid nineteenth-century landscape park with formal Italianate garden and extensive kitchen garden.  

1850s and 1860s.  

Registered for its historic interest as a mid-nineteenth century landscape park with formal Italianate garden laid out by the eminent Victorian garden designer Edward Milner (1819-1884). The formal garden includes a French cast-iron fountain by Barbezat & Cie dating to the 1850s. The stream near the former Grand Lodge was laid out with artificial pools, waterfalls and rockwork by James Pulham & Son. There is also an extensive kitchen garden. In the 1850s Bryn-y-Neuadd was purchased by John Platt, a wealthy textile engineer, who built a new house, model farm, several other estate buildings, railway station, church, and much of the village of Llanfairfechan. The first edition 1-in. to the mile Ordnance Survey map of 1840-41 shows a house and small enclosure with trees, and a building on the site of the farm (and the railway), but there appears to have been nothing else on the site before Platt's time. Platt employed Edward Milner, who was by this time a well-known garden designer, having served an apprenticeship with Joseph Paxton, to lay out the park. Bryn-y-Neuadd is an excellent and very typical example of Milner's formal garden style, linked to parkland with flowing curves, specimen trees and shrubberies. Much of the layout is preserved, and can be appreciated, but there is also a detailed contemporary account by John Gould in the Journal of Horticulture and Cottage Gardener (1864), which mentions much that is gone. Bryn-y-Neuadd mansion (NPRN 26139) was situated on ground sloping gently down to the sea, on the western edge of the village of Llanfairfechan. The house stood in the centre of a park. The park was bounded on the north by the railway, on the east by the village and on the west by the old A55 road. The house was demolished in the 1960s to make way for a hospital, but the stable block (LB: 3516) to the immediate north-east, and some other estate buildings, remain (LB: 3518; 3519; 3520; 5841). The original park lay-out of Edward Milner survives. The slope below the house was terraced, and a formal garden was laid out to the south-west. Beyond this the park was planted with groups and belts of trees, under-planted with shrubbery. A complex of routes around the house site partly follow original routes, whilst others are new. In the nineteenth century, carriage drives led away from the house to the south-west, south-east and north-east. The drive from the south-west corner survives though its Grand Lodge has gone. This continues, with an avenue, out to the south-east lodge; it was the original drive and is now the main entrance. Although the modern hospital consists of many buildings scattered over the eastern part of the park, these have been sited in such a way that almost all the copses, woods and groups of trees designed by Milner have survived. These are mostly mixed coniferous and deciduous plantings with under-planting of rhododendron and laurel. There are some individual trees, mostly oak and sycamore in the open areas. The south-west corner of the park was originally landscaped with a stream dammed into pools, embellished with Pulhamite rockwork, and decorated with artificial islands and waterfalls, within mixed woodland and shrubs. Most of this was destroyed during construction of the new A55, everything to the north of the Grand Lodge having been swept away. Further land belonging to the estate lay close to the sea, on the far side of the railway, and a plantation was made flanking a way down to the beach. There were once bathing-huts on the beach but these are not shown on the earliest maps. The formal garden was laid out at the same time as the rest of the grounds. There are terraces to the south-west and north-east of the house site. That on the south-west is retained by a low wall and a central shallow flight of steps leads down into the formal garden. The terrace on the north-east partly overlooks the grassy bank on the north-west side of the formal garden, and a long flight of steps, again roughly central to the terrace, descends across this bank into what is now a car park. From the house site a flight of steps leads down into the gravelled, rectangular Italianate formal garden on the south-west. Its apsidal end accommodates a large and elaborate, circular, cast-iron fountain in Italian Renaissance style, by Barbezat & Cie (LB: 3517). Beyond the apsidal end is a small, level, rectangular area, recently used as a bowling green, with a hedge on three sides and a rockery bank at the base of two of them. There was once a long, narrow glasshouse across the end of the formal garden. Next to this area is a grotto with a winding passage, and an underground chamber, possibly connected with heating for the former glasshouse. To the south of the formal garden are groups of trees and shrubs with a path, as shown on the 1888 map. To the north-west, the ground slopes away. There is a flight of steps down from the formal garden, and another, to the north-east, from the terrace across the north-west of the house site. Between the two is a terraced grassy slope, also shown on the 1888 map. This overlooked lawn areas with groups of trees, now partly occupied by a car park. The garden of only five acres was originally richly planted and, along with the kitchen garden, required 11 gardeners to maintain it. The kitchen garden survives and lies on the north-eastern edge of the estate next to the model farm. The garden is rectangular with two concentric walls on three sides which remain complete; the outer wall is up to 6m high and the inner about 3m. There is a smaller rectangular enclosure conjoining on the north. The garden was noted for its extensive ranges of glasshouses which are now ruinous; aerial images suggest that these have now been largely removed. Along the north side of the garden north wall, in the enclosure, are the ruins of two boiler houses, bothy and sheds. In the yard at the east end of the enclosure are ruinous sheds and pigsties. The original head gardener’s cottage, Bronrardd (LB: 5841) lies just outside the walled garden and had its own small walled garden. Sources: Cadw 1998: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales: Conwy, Gwynedd & the Isle of Anglesey, 70-3 (ref: PGW(Gd)3(CON)). Ordnance Survey first-edition six-inch map: sheet Caernarfonshire VII.NE (1888).