Aberglasney: the theory,history and archaeology of a post-medieval landscape

Abstract

Printed and documentary sources, archaeological excavation, dendrochronology and geophysical survey are employed to investigate the history of Aberglasney, a small country house near Llandeilo, Carmarthenshire (SN 5815 2213). Traditions about its garden layout, parapet walkway, a gatehouse and a yew ‘tunnel’ are examined. Circa 1600, Bishop Anthony Rudd (1549–1614) probably built a ‘cwrt’ enclosure aligned north-south. The gatehouse belonged to this or a later house. In 1770 or later, the Dyer family rebuilt the house, probably redesigned and rewalled the entire estate layout, when an earlier farm building was converted into the parapet walkway and stock pens, in an area later known as the ‘cloistered court’. In Victorian times this feature, originally a farmyard, became a pleasure garden, part of a typical Georgian-Victorian complex including a kitchen garden, glasshouses, orchards and fishpond. A yew grove was established, most likely c. 1805, when the Philipps family began planting in a Picturesque style. Abandoned c. 1950, house and garden became dilapidated. The site is now the object of a radical development programme, involving inter alia the stabilization of all buildings fabric, and imposing 16th-/17th-century style formal gardens over the 18th-/19th-century kitchen garden and orchard.