PGW(Gd)25(GWY)

Rhiwlas  

II  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Gwynedd  

Llandderfel  

292352  

337044  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Park, ornamental gardens, woodland walk, walled kitchen gardens.  

Late eighteenth and nineteenth century.  

Registered as a well-situated and well-preserved landscape park initially laid out by eminent landscape designer William Emes (1729-1803). The park retains some fine mature trees and provides the setting for the varied ornamental gardens. The registered park and garden has group value with the hall and associated estate outbuildings and structures. Rhiwlas Hall (NPRN: 28709) is located on the east bank of the Afon Tryweryn. The house is modern, replacing an enormous rambling nineteenth-century mansion which was demolished in the early 1950s. This was three-storeyed and castellated with turrets, built in 1809 on the same site as previous houses. The present house was designed by Clough Williams-Ellis and built in 1954. The park lies mainly to the south, west and north-west of the house. The date of the park is uncertain but a late eighteenth-century tourist report indicates that parkland improvements were then underway by William Emes. The Afon Tryweryn defines the west and south sides of the park and runs all along the west side of the main drive. This long drive, still passable by vehicles but no longer used, leads off from the south-east corner of the park, at Bala, through a grand, castellated, Gothic gateway with lodge. It passes through a narrow strip of woodland of mainly deciduous trees, notably beech and oak. The east, service, drive is now the main approach. The park otherwise falls into two main areas; to the south/south-west and north-west of the house. The part of the park south of the house falls gently towards the river, and the house, which faces south, thus looks out towards the river over sloping pastureland, dotted with trees, mostly oak, beech, sycamore and lime. The area of parkland to the north-west is completely different in character. It is steep, with rocky outcrops, and was formerly wooded and it still has much of the character of open woodland. This area is shown as woodland on the 25 in. Ordnance Survey map of 1901 and is still known as Coed Mawr. There are a couple of small quarries here as well, doubtless used to supply stone for estate use. The wooded hill, Coed Mawr, had, in 1901, paths leading to a footbridge over the river to the west, out of the park to the north, and in a loop along part of the west side, presumably a pleasure walk. An ice-house is located beside the river, and upstream was a series of collecting pools. A ha-ha between the garden and park was built in the 1970s, and a tennis court has been constructed below the east drive. The gardens are largely informal and form two contrasting parts: the steep rockery, lawn and shrubbery to the west of the house, and the woodland walk and semi-formal gardens to the east. The western area contains planting post-dating the 1860s, and the rockery of probable late nineteenth or early twentieth-century date, but has some earlier elements, notably a wall thought to date from the sixteenth-century. The rockery has largely disappeared but was once extensive with plantings of shrubs and trees. The flatter area to the east of the house is mostly taken up by the kitchen gardens. Most of the rest is given over to nineteenth-century shrubbery or woodland walk. The shrubbery and the area north of the east drive are probably on the site of natural oak woodland. Some old oaks are left in place with other trees planted at various times. The older shrubs consist mainly of rhododendron and laurel but with some holly, box and yew under-planting. The area of lawns and ornamental plantings to the north, between this and the south wall of the kitchen garden, is probably contemporary, taking advantage of a warm sunny spot, both for growing roses and other plants which need an open situation, and for recreational purposes. The grassy strip north of the east drive contains some oaks which probably remain from the original natural woodland. To these have been added other trees, including birch, beech, pines and other conifers but most notably a magnificent group of giant sequoias or Wellingtonias (Sequoiadendron giganteum). These, and big firs in the shrubbery and some of the older other conifers, were planted in the 1860s. The walled gardens comprise two conjoined kitchen gardens aligned east-west, walled all round in brick and stone. They are likely to be contemporary with the early nineteenth-century house though the hand-made brick used suggests a possible earlier date. The smaller, western one is an irregular quadrangle, its walls lower than the east garden walls (2m), with entrances from the eastern garden and from outside. The main, eastern, garden is larger and rectangular, its long axis east-west, walls 2m-3m high and showing much evidence of collapse and repair. Still in use, there are original entrances in all walls aside from the east. The interior was originally divided into four parts by paths. The two northern areas were smaller as there were several large glasshouses along and in front of the north wall of which only bases remain. They included a pear house, a vine house against the wall and a sunken melon pit just to the south. A range of buildings outside the north wall included a boiler house which has now gone. Significant View: Views south from the house and gardens across the park and surrounding countryside. Source: Cadw 1998: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales: Conwy, Gwynedd & the Isle of Anglesey, 292-5 (ref: PGW(Gd)25(CON)). Ordnance Survey second-edition 25-inch map: sheet Merionethshire XIV.15 (1901). S.P.Beaman and S.Roaf, The Ice Houses of Britain, p.536.