PGW(Po)41(POW)

Bryngwyn  

II*  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Powys  

Meifod  

317825  

318009  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

House with small formal garden set in park with lake and intact shelter belts.  

c. 1770, with additions or alterations c.1800 (following fire damage), c. 1813, c. 1914, c. 1989  

Registered for its well-preserved late eighteenth to early nineteenth-century landscape park and garden in a scenic situation and associated with the house of the same date. The park is enclosed by intact shelter belts and the grounds incorporate a lake dating to at least the nineteenth-century. Bryngwyn has important historical associations with the architect Robert Mylne (1733-1811) who designed the house for William Mostyn. The registered area has group value with the house (built 1773-4) and the stables and coach-house (c.1813). Bryngwyn Hall (LB: 8710) is situated on the summit of a small hill to the north-east of the village of Bwlch-y-cibau. The park surrounds the house. It is roughly circular in shape and covers about 60 acres, rising to the summit on which the house was built. The park lies in the natural, glaciated landscape associated with this part of Montgomeryshire, creating gentle undulating ground which was highlighted by carefully considered tree planting. No earth-moving is thought to have taken place and no known landscape designer to have been employed. The early history of the park is unclear but it appears that there has been some sort of park in existence since at least the eighteenth-century. The park which survives today dates from 1813, mainly the work of Martin Williams (owner from 1813 until his death in 1856) who seems to have been sympathetic to the ideas of the Picturesque Movement. A drive enters the site from the A490 in the west, replacing an earlier drive which approached from the south-west but which fell out of use at some time in the twentieth-century. There is no lodge and none has ever been recorded. An irregular, curving shelter belt of mixed woodland surrounds the western, south-western and northern periphery of the park. To the south, the park is enclosed by the tree-planted hillside of Bryngwyn Wood, known as 'Madams' Wood'; the actual park boundary here is created by a lane which connects Bwlch-y-Cibau with Glanbrogan. A boundary plantation stands on the east of the park and the open parkland is dotted with mature parkland trees, mainly oak. Ornamental gardens lie to the northeast, east and south of the house and, including the lake, cover about 18 acres. Their early history is unclear. It is assumed that a garden would have been in existence from about 1830. The 1840 tithe map records the area as ‘Bryngwyn Pleasure Grounds and Shrubberies’. The presence of mature yews to the south-east and north-west of the house may mark the boundary of an earlier garden; the oldest plantings here, they are possibly associated with the earlier house. The form of the nineteenth-century garden would have been partly dictated by the presence of the ha-ha which is known to have been in position since at least 1825 - its own position possibly determined by the yew trees - when it was recorded on a map included in sale particulars. The ha-ha seems to have retained its divisional role between garden and park at least until 1889 as the Ordnance Survey map clearly shows the 'garden' area clearly confined within it. Photographs of c.1868 show the gardens as lawn planted with shrubs. From 1903, the then owner, Arthur Sandbach, began to develop the east garden. Straight formal gravel paths, possibly reinstatements of Victorian paths, were laid out around the south and east of the house and a long, sloping, straight walk leading east from the bay window to, by about 1910, a small paved terrace. The gardens were extended beyond the ha-ha to the east. Photographs of about 1909 record this work. Today, the northeast front opens onto a raised lawn below which is a rectangular area, possibly once the formal garden. Steps descend on to a more informal tree and shrub planted sloping lawn which supports large clumps of mature rhododendrons, azaleas, Japanese maples and many new plantings, together with trees and roses; these grow along the north side of this area which is defined by a shelter belt. To the north-east a new hard tennis court has been constructed on a raised platform which extends out into the park. To the south of the informal east lawn there is a croquet lawn enclosed by young yew hedges, and next to it a new, rectangular formal rose garden. On the south front of the house a narrow strip of sloping lawn, planted with a large mature larch, runs down to the ha-ha, beyond which a wide, tree planted sloping lawn, sweeps down to the northern edge of the lake. The ha-ha runs about 5m from the south-west corner of the house curving around for about 40m to the east, to the central walk steps. The lake covers about 9 acres and is in two sections. Trees and shrubs grow around it and it is inhabited by wild fowl and ducks. To the west of the house and separated from it by a gravel forecourt, is an area of lawn that runs into a small area of woodland. A walled kitchen garden, about 1 acre in extent, lay at the north-eastern end of the lake. It is now planted up with trees. The kitchen garden is recorded on an 1839 estate map. Significant Views: Views from the house and gardens across the parkland and surrounding countryside. Sources: Cadw 1999: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Powys, 32-34 (ref: PGW(Po)41(POW)). Ordnance Survey first edition 6-inch map: sheet Montgomeryshire X.SW (1884) Ordnance Survey second edition 25-inch map: sheet Montgomeryshire X.13 (1901).