PGW(C)7(FLT)

Penbedw  

II*  

01/02/2022  

Designated  

Flintshire  

Nannerch  

316488  

368176  

Gardens, Parks and Urban Spaces  

Landscape park, formal woodland, multi-phase garden with formal and informal elements.  

Mid seventeenth century; eighteenth century; nineteenth century.  

The registered park and garden represents the survival and development of the grounds at Penbedw since the seventeenth century. The registered area contains formal elements of a seventeenth-century/early eighteenth-century layout, including a wilderness with grotto and summerhouse. The registered area has group value with the associated estate buildings and structures, including the nineteenth-century entrance lodges and gates (LB: 26914 & LB: 26926) and the nineteenth-century barn (LB: 26924) modified in the late nineteenth or early twentieth-century by Harry Buddicom (1859-1925) as a stable. Penbedw, with nearby Cilcain, was in the hands of the Mostyn family until the early eighteenth-century, when it passed by marriage to the Williams family. The three-storey house was built in 1775 and depicted by Moses Griffith in a drawing of this time. Pennant noted (A Tour in Wales) 'the seat of Watkin Williams Esquire, which is a great ornament to this little valley'. In 1852 Colonel Williams sold Penbedw to Mr William Barber Buddicom (1816-1887) a leading railway engineer. The house was demolished in about 1958. Penbedw has a small landscape park dating from after 1853. From it there are fine views of the Clwydian Hills to the west. The park was made to the south-east of the house, taking in two paddocks that formed part of an earlier layout. The one nearer the house was walled according to an eighteenth-century map of the demesne. The second paddock contains a round barrow (scheduled monument FL134). The extension of the park to the south of this area involved the construction of a drive which sweeps gently west across the park from the south entrance at Mold Lodge. The drive passes a stone circle and the Penbedw standing stone (scheduled monument FL008) and is flanked by an avenue of horse chestnuts, shown on the early eighteenth-century estate plan. From this point the drive curves west and then sharply north, crossing a small stream via a bridge before entering the pleasure grounds. The drive continues north, passing the house site and arriving at the farmhouse and farm yard. A second drive approaches the house from the east. This is the original drive but in the eighteenth century the entrance was a little to the south of the present one. The lower end of the drive was bordered by sweet chestnuts, some of which survive, with a group of small ponds roughly on the site of the lodge and entrance. The east drive continues in a straight line west, ascending towards Moel Arthur Camp (scheduled monument FL010). A beech avenue is shown flanking the first part of the track on an eighteenth-century plan of the estate. In the mid nineteenth-century the Mold and Denbigh Junction railway was constructed to the east of the estate. The Buddicoms duly made a gate and drive at Nannerch to the north, which passes through the wilderness. To the east of the wilderness and west of the A541 is a long narrow field bordered by a line of limes which lead to the village of Nannerch. The gardens lie in two distinct areas: those immediately around the house, and the Big Wood, the wilderness to the north-east of the house site. Although little of the original planting survives in the wilderness, subsequent planting seems to have followed the original planting patterns in a series of axial rides. The wilderness is divided into three distinct areas. An open paddock area in the middle faces west to the Clwydian hills. The main area of the wood is composed of geometric shapes of woodland, now beech, formed by axial paths, with a two-storey brick hexagonal summerhouse as a focal point (NPRN:23060). The western block of woodland was composed, probably of conifers, according to the plan, with a focal point of a yew in a hollow at the centre of the plantation. A small alcove-shaped rockwork grotto lies at the north-eastern corner of the wilderness, overlooking the remains of a formal canal, which is now just a hollow in the ground. Edward Lluyd is probably referring to this (and the other grotto in the garden) in a letter to Richard Mostyn at Penbedw, of 11 November 1707, which mentions 'your artificial caves, which I take to be the only curiosity extant of the kind'. The other part of the pleasure garden lies in the immediate vicinity of the house site. Woodland with radiating paths is illustrated to the west of the house, and although the species probably differ from the original the same planting lines have been kept. To the south of this triangular piece of woodland is another canal, which is stone lined and still contains water, being fed by a spring at its head. East of the canal on a bank sloping towards the house lie the remains of an Edwardian rock garden. A set of steps in the centre of the bank, leads to a path running the width of the bank and to another set of steps which once led to an Edwardian formal garden with stone setts and a central pond forming a quatrefoil. This garden, which stood to the south of the house, is depicted in a postcard of about 1918 and the layout is shown on the 25-inch Ordnance Survey map of 1912. The centre of the pond was at one time decorated by a loggia of classical columns. The columns now support the porch of the present farmhouse. This formal garden is now replaced by a tennis court, around which are stone revetment walls with buttresses, possibly belonging to an earlier late seventeenth or eighteenth-century layout. Directly to the east of the drive are the remains of a much earlier plantation overlaid with nineteenth-century plantings. On the eighteenth-century plan this area appears as a very simple plantation with straight lines of trees, perhaps a grove. Holm oaks survive from this period. On the north-west corner of the plantation is a group of four old limes, now providing shelter for an Edwardian heather hut. Interspersed amongst this grove of holm oaks are nineteenth-century plantings of trees such as redwoods, hollies, yews and rhododendrons. In the centre of this grove are the remains of a small Edwardian stone-edged flower bed. This area is bordered to the east by the ha-ha. To the south where the stream forms the boundary of the pleasure garden is an alcove-shaped rockwork grotto relating to the earlier layout, and a bathing tank lined with stone slabs. The Sale Particulars of 1853 mention a 'fountain grotto', and a 'bath house and bath'. The walled garden is situated adjacent to the drive from Middle Lodge. From an old plan it appears to have been divided up internally by either hedges or walls. At the south end is a nineteenth to early twentieth-century entrance. Significant Views: west towards the Clwydian Range. Views across the park from the summerhouse. Sources: Cadw 1995: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Clwyd (ref: PGW(C)7). Ordnance Survey six-inch map, Flintshire Sheet IX (1880) Ordnance Survey 25-inch map, Flintshire Sheet IX.13 (1912)