Summary Description and Reason for Designation
Registered for its historic interest as the remains of a seventeeth-century walled garden and for group value with the listed house, agricultural range, garden walls and well house at Bachymbyd Fawr.
Bachymbyd is a seventeenth-century house (Cadw LB: 719; NPRN 26772) on an ancient site located on the western edge of the Vale of Clwyd, on the west side of the A525 Ruthin to Denbigh road. Much of the structure of the garden and its perimeter walls are thought to be seventeenth-century in origin and contemporary with the rebuilding of the house in 1666 (Cadw LB: 22146) by Charles Salesbury.
The garden, on ground falling away to the north-east, is linear with long axis north-east by south-west, the house at the south-west end. The house is accessed via a drive alongside the south-east boundary of the garden. The garden surrounds the house and is built up with a drop to a small pond on the north-east side. The ground is retained here by a stone wall which incorporates a well house, with the wall also used as a bee garth. The remains of an orchard lie at the rear.
Immediately in front of the house is a long lawn, partly enclosed by Leylandii hedges and shrub border, with a swimming pool at the far end. Part way down the lawn, on its north-west side, is a steep bank (possibly a former garden boundary) on the far side of which is a tennis court and twentieth-century summerhouse. There are shallow terraces on the south-east side, and below is a piece of informal ground flanking the drive. It contains the pond and, to the north-east, a much larger rectangular one, probably a fish pond in origin but now largely overgrown.
The land beyond this pond was alienated from the estate in the 1930s, and is partly built on, but it still contains a group of late seventeenth-century sweet chestnuts known locally as The Three Sisters and said to have been planted by the three daughters of Sir William Salusbury.
Setting: Bachymbyd is situated in rural Denbighshire on the western edge of the Vale of Clwyd, on ground rising to the west. Just to its east are the A525 Ruthin to Denbigh road and the river Clywedog.
Significant views: From the house along the main axis of the garden and views from the house and gardens towards the Vale of Clwyd and Clwydian Range in the distance.
Sources:
Cadw 1995: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Clwyd, 6-8 (ref: PGW(C)27).
Ordnance Survey, 25-inch map: sheet Denbighshire XIV.14 (second edition 1900).
Additional notes: D.K.Leighton.