Garden walls at Tan-y-bwlch

Cadw's description

Location

The garden walls at Tan-y-bwlch are on the N side of the home farm complex, adjacent to the river.

History

The gardens and orchard were constructed as the kitchen garden for Plas Dinas. Edmund Buckley, whose father was a wealthy Manchester industrialist, purchased the estate in 1856. He intended to develop Dinas Mawddwy as a garden city, with a railway, revived industries and good quality housing for his employees. Sir Edmund Buckley carried out experiments with a new material, cast concrete, and was one of the pioneers in Wales in working with this material, his work being contemporary with that of Lord Sudeley at Greygynog. When the estate was sold in 1878, the kitchen garden was described as an enclosure of about 4 acres (1.6ha), divided into 3 gardens and 'bounded by substantial concrete walls, 9' (2.74m) high, affording ample scope for the cultivation of fruit trees'.

Exterior

The garden walls which were apparently built to enclose orchards and a kitchen garden, are constructed uniformly in 230-250mm thick in-situ no-fines concrete with a crushed slate waste aggregate, laid within shutters in lifts of c60cm. They stand on average 3m high but in places up to 4m, and form a large sub-rectangular enclosure, approximately 10m x 12.5m, subdivided at the N end by cross walls forming two smaller enclosures. The walls are without provision for linear movement, and daywork joints are not clear, but all the walls have occasional door openings where timber doorframes have been cast in, and straight and low triangular timber lintels. On the N side the wall is on the edge of a river terrace, thus has two small buttresses of the same material, but the walls are otherwise not horizontally restrained. At the SW corner, where the wall approaches the NW corner of the farmyard N range, there is an attached small stone-built structure containing a privy and boiler room, with a slate roof, and on the NE corner of the gardens a small rectangular structure, now roofless, outside the line of the walls. The walls have toppled in places, probably due to wind pressure, but have generally survived remarkably well.

Reason for designation

Included as an essay in cast in-situ concrete remarkable for its early date and lack of lateral support, part of the complete surviving C19 farmstead group at Tan-y-bwlch.