PGW(C)11(WRE)

Whitehurst  

II*  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Wrexham  

Chirk  

328814  

339985  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Walled garden.  

Seventeenth century.  

Registered for the survival of a seventeenth-century walled garden to Chirk Castle, incorporating tiered curving fruit walls, a banqueting house and mount. The garden was laid out by Sir Thomas Myddleton II (1586-1666) of Chirk Castle as a pleasure garden in about 1651. The registered area shares group value with its associated listed buildings and structures. The gardens at Whitehurst are situated about two kilometres north of Chirk Castle. They lie adjacent to the A5 on sloping ground facing south, in a roughly rectangular area enclosed variously by stone and brick walls (LB: 1286). The north half of the interior is laid out in a series of terraces divided by four curving brick walls which were originally used for fruit growing (LB: 20224; 20225; 20226). The walls survive, except for part of the second wall, only the west end of which is extant. Subsequent to their building a gateway and steps were inserted in the wall between the first and second terraces. The wall over the gateway was rebuilt and a keystone carved with the initials 'T M' (Thomas Myddleton) and the date '1651' was added. It would appear that this is not in situ and has been moved from elsewhere in the garden. A banqueting house is built into the lowest wall on the west end. This is a late seventeenth-century or early eighteenth-century square brick building with a pyramidal slate roof (LB: 1288). Near the boundary on the south side of the garden is a conical, flat-topped mount which would have afforded views of the garden and the surrounding landscape. A note in the Chirk Castle Accounts (I, Note 117, p.36) describes it as a place where Sir Thomas Myddleton could entertain his friends, as it was convenient to those travelling north and south through the village, and thus they were saved nearly two miles journey to the castle. The accounts record purchases of plants for the garden, and the building of banqueting houses. The garden was described by Thomas Dineley in The Beaufort Progress (1684) as being an 'Admirable Walled GARDEN of Trees Plants Flowers and Herbs of the greatest rarity as well forreigne as of Great Britain, Orrenge and Lemon Trees the Sensitive Plant & c’, where Sir Richard Myddleton entertained the 1st Duke of Beaufort to a collation of 'choice fruits and wines' in a banqueting house. The main evidence for its early appearance lies in the 1735 drawing by Thomas Badeslade of 'The West Prospect of Chirk Castle'. This shows the layout of the garden in some detail, including the curving terraces and the mount. The southern and eastern parts of the garden are shown as plantations, with rows of conifers along the west and north boundaries and across the centre. The mount is shown with radiating rides cut through plantations on its slopes, and a spiral ride up to the top, which is planted with a single conifer. The drawing shows a building, no longer extant, in the same wall as the present banqueting house but further to the east. Another building is shown above it on the second terrace. These are probably the banqueting houses mentioned in the accounts. A plan by Boydell, dated 1775, also shows the detail of the garden, including a triangular canal, which is also shown on the later tithe plan (1839). However, it is not shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey map (surveyed 1873). The garden continued in use as a productive garden into the nineteenth and early twentieth-century. Against the top wall is the frame of an early twentieth-century lean-to vinery, believed to be by Mackenzie and Moncur. Immediately to the east of the walled garden and directly outside the boundary wall is the Black Park, the largest of the three parks belonging to the Chirk Castle estate. Sources: Cadw 1995: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Clwyd (ref: PGW(C)11). Ordnance Survey second-edition 25-inch plan, sheet: Denbighshire XL,2 (1899).