PGW(Gt)14(MON)

Llanfihangel Court  

I  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Monmouthshire  

Crucorney  

333102  

220305  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Formal garden; remains of formally laid out park; walled kitchen garden.  

1670s; eighteenth to twentieth century  

Registered as a rare surviving example of a seventeenth-century formal terraced garden and the remains of a formally laid out park including a seventeenth-century avenue of sweet chestnuts. This grade I registered park and garden is a rare survival of exceptional quality. The registered park and garden has important group value with the listed buildings at Llanfihangel Court. The house stands on levelled ground on the east side of the Honddu river valley, to the southeast of the village of Llanvihangel Crucorney. It has late medieval origins which has developed over the centuries and has well-preserved features from several periods (LB: 1919). To the south of the house are various outbuildings, including a fine early seventeenth-century brick stable block (LB: 19288), threshing barn (LB:1944) and cider-house (LB: 19286). A coach house (LB: 19284) stands to the north-west of the house next to the entrance gate. It is thought that John Arnold laid out the park with axial avenues in the 1670s (he succeeded his father in 1665). A painting dated to about 1680 shows the house and park in a bird's-eye view. The house is in the centre, with the Skirrid Mountain in the background, the Honddu River on the right, and the Abergavenny-Hereford road next to it, forming the western boundary of the park. A straight drive in an avenue leads from the centre of the north front of the house to the main park entrance off the road, where there are gates flanked by piers with ball finials. A wall runs eastwards from the gate, marking the boundary of the park. The park is shown laid out with formal groves of trees to the north-east, north-west and west of the house, and with a further large wood to the east, further away from the house. As well as the north avenue there are two further ones to the south of the house - one running south (the sweet chestnut avenue that survives) and one running diagonally off to the south-east and then bending to the east. It appears to have gate piers on either side of it just short of the bend. The straight drive from the village east to the entrance at the foot of the terraces is also shown on the painting, with formal groves of trees on either side. The rest of the park appears in the painting to be open grassland apart from some faintly drawn conifer plantations at the north end, to the east of the drive. There is no reason to doubt the rough accuracy of the painting, which therefore gives a very good idea of what the park looked like in the 1680s. There appears to have been little alteration to the park after this date. Some landscaping took place, probably between 1796 and 1822, mainly to the east of the house, where a ha-ha was made roughly on the line of a wall of the earlier formal gardens, and a small lake was made below. This, combined with the removal of the walled garden on this side, opened up views of the park from the house. The layout of the park at the end of the nineteenth century is shown on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map. The avenues to the north (pine) and south (sweet chestnut) of the house were the principal features of the park. The north avenue survived until the 1940s, and was said not to have been Scots pine but a more unusual variety. It has recently been replanted. The carriage drive that accompanied it had already gone when a map of the park was made in 1822. The avenue to the south still survives, as does the grove of sweet chestnut trees to the west of the north end, but the trees appear to be coming to the end of their lives, and some are already dead. The avenues to the south-east have gone. The park today consists largely of pasture, orchard and isolated deciduous trees, mainly oak. The gardens lie to the north and east of the house. Aligned on the centre of the north side of the house are three terraces with stone revetment walls, some brickwork walls and a wide flight of central steps with a semi-circular flight at the bottom (LB: 19289). These are thought to date from the 1670s, when John Arnold owned the Court. The first documentary proof of their existence is the painting dated to the 1680s, which shows the terraces to the north and further formal walled gardens to the east divided into square compartments. Below the terraces the painting shows a walled enclosure and the north drive and avenue leading off from a central path. The enclosure remains, without a wall on the north side, but the central path and drive have gone, and the area is now level lawn flanked by woodland with a gravel forecourt at the foot of the terraces. On the west side of this is an entrance gate. Just outside this gate, to the south, is a brick coach-house. Some of the stone piers in this part of the garden were rebuilt in the early twentieth-century. To the east of the house the garden is now largely lawn. The formal walled gardens shown in the painting were removed between 1796 (Williams engraving) and 1822 (Davies estate map) and replaced by a level lawn next to the house bounded by a ha-ha. A small lake was probably made at the same time at the foot of the slope (1822 map). All that is left of the original formal garden on the east side is the circular 'Guardhouse' (LB:1945) a two-storey pavilion of stone, brick and slate now standing on the northern edge of the lawn, S of the lake. Originally it formed the northeast corner of the walled garden on this side, and there were at least two more (shown on the painting), one in the southeast corner and one in the northwest corner of the lower compartment. This one is shown on an engraving in Williams' History of Monmouthshire (Pl XXVII), which shows it to have been a similar circular structure built into the garden wall, with single-storey outbuildings to its west (also shown on an engraving in Coxe's Tour). Both engravings also show the north terraces. The lawn is bounded on its north side by an area of mixed woodland and the sinuous lake. The woodland to the east of the lake has been planted (probably early twentieth-century) with mixed conifers and rhododendrons. To the southeast of the house the ground slopes up steeply above the level terrace, and is partly revetted in stone, with stone steps up the slope near the house. At the foot of these is a small lily pool (1930s). The square walled kitchen garden (LB: 19287) lies south of the house and outbuildings. It is shown on Davies estate map of 1822 and probably dates to the late eighteenth-century. The brick walls in English garden wall bond stand to their full height with stone coping. The former head gardener’s cottage is situated to the north of the walled garden. Significant Views: From the house and garden, north across the park along the former pine avenue, and east across the park. Sources: Cadw 1994: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales: Gwent, 69-70 (ref: PGW (Gt)7).