PGW(Po)34(POW)

Leighton Hall  

I  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Powys  

Forden with Leighton and Trelystan  

324205  

304623  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

High Victorian formal garden with ornamental woodland and parkland.  

House c. 1840 on; garden (Edward Kemp) c. 1850.  

Registered at grade I as a high Victorian formal garden, contemporary with the house, of exceptional historic interest and by the well-known garden designer Edward Kemp (1817-1891). The estate was run as a model farm and has an exceptional collection of Victorian agricultural buildings. The woodlands are of high arboricultural interest, especially the Charles Ackers Grove and Naylor pinetum. The Leyland cypress was bred at Leighton. The registered park and garden has strong group value with Leighton Hall and the associated estate buildings and structures, most of which are listed buildings. A deer park is believed to have been established in the north park during the seventeenth-century under Sir Uvedale Corbett. Uvedale Corbetts' son, Sir Richard, took advantage of the wooded eastern slopes of the park in the early eighteenth century, felling large areas of oak for sale to the Admiralty. Following the purchase and gift of the estate in 1845 from Panton Corbett by the Leyland family to John Naylor, Liverpool industrialist and banker, Naylor began to lay out a model estate which embraced the technology of Victorian industry but one that also served to highlight his own social standing. Leighton Hall (LB: 8663) was built between 1850 and 1856 for John Naylor, by the Liverpool architect W. H. Gee. A new Home Farm complex was built to the north of the house, but out of its view, and set-piece lodges, formal entrances, a new central-northern estate road, estate buildings and a boundary wall were built around the new house. Specimen trees dotted about the farmland around Leighton are further testament to Naylor’s improvements. Naylor retained the deer park in the northwest park, filling it with pale fallow deer. He also retained some of the older smallholdings and cottages within the northern park. The form of the belt plantations in the northwest park date from this period. In the 1860s Naylor began to develop a second area of formal parkland to the west of the Kingswood road, the New Park. Plantations were laid out around this park on the west and south with Moor Park, which included a new lodge (LB: 19553) and a formal drive, on the east. The house and grounds cost Naylor an estimated £275,000 and included the most modern technology of the day. The house was at the centre of a modern, technologically advanced estate, which extended to over 4,000 acres. All Naylor's improvements are beautifully recorded in J. Harrison’s bound maps of Leighton Hall, The Estate and Lands of John Naylor Esq, in egg tempura and gold-leaf on velum, dating from the 1860s and now held at the National Library of Wales. Holy Trinity church (LB: 8668) is situated approximately 1km to the north of Leighton Hall. It was designed and built by W. H. Gee in 1851-53, at the same time as he was working on the hall and was positioned partly to serve as an eye-catcher from the hall and garden. The gardens lie to the north, east and south of the house and cover about 6 acres. The gardens at Leighton Hall were laid out from about 1850 by Edward Kemp, a pupil of Sir Joseph Paxton, and were designed at considerable expense to include 'set-pieces' with pools and sculpture, linked together by the raised walkways (LB: 19525; 19526) and bridges (LB: 15627; 15628; 19531). The gardens included a rose garden (the later 'Library Garden' LB: 19524), a geometric garden (the east terraces) and more informal gardens around the lake (LB: 19529 – arbour; 19530 - cascade). The gardens were complete by about 1870 and remained virtually unaltered until about 1930, partly due to the longevity of John Naylor's widow who lived on at Leighton for twenty years, following his death in 1889. Outside the garden, John Naylor ornamented parts of the wider estate, particularly on the Long Mountain to the east, as ‘pleasure grounds’. These were reached by an extensive system of tracks. The main features of interest to remain are the cascades and ponds (LB: 19551) in the valley to the east of Park House (LB: 19500), the conifer groves and the Poultry House (LB: 8667) to the south-east of the Hall. A funicular railway to a summer house at the top of the ridge, in place by 1870, has gone (LB: 8664 – upper cable house/summerhouse). To the south of the Poultry House there is an open tree-planted area of grass on the sloping hillside. This is the Naylor pinetum and the area contains many fine, mature, examples of pines, firs and other conifers. To the south and east of the pinetum the woodland becomes steadily denser and redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) predominate. This is the Charles Ackers grove. Informal paths wind through the woodland. Redwoods dating from the 1870s grow to the south of the western track and these trees have reached well over 100m in height. To the south of the Poultry House there is a stand of about ten mature Leyland cypress trees (x Cupressocyparis leylandii). This hybrid arose as a chance cross in 1888 between two trees at Leighton, a Cupressus macrocarpa and a Chamaecyparis nootkatensis. The original tree was lost in a storm in 1954. Other groves of conifers have been planted on the Long Mountain, including one of wellingtonias (Sequoiadendron giganteum) and one of Metasequoia glyptostroboides. The square, walled kitchen garden lies to the south-east of the main garden. It is divided internally into four equal-sized quadrants by an east-west cross wall and a north-south terrace wall. Significant Views: From the estate across the Severn valley and towards Powis Castle. Holy Trinity church was positioned partly to serve as an eye-catcher from the hall and garden. Source: Cadw 1999: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Powys, (ref: PGW (Po)34(POW)). Ordnance Survey six-inch map sheet: Montgomeryshire XXIII.SE (1885)