Historic Landscape Characterisation

Maelor Saesneg: Gredington
Hanmer community, Wrexham County Borough
(HLCA 1124)

Late glacial mere, woodland, parkland and former parkland, some overlying areas of medieval open field, associated with the Gredington and Bettisfield Park country houses.

Historic background

The properties at Gredington and at Bettisfield Park may have been amongst the lands granted to Haughmond Abbey, Shropshire, during the Middle Ages and acquired by the Hanmers at the dissolution of the monasteries. An earlier hall at Gredington was in the hands of the Hanmers probably by at least the mid 17th-century, Roger Hanmer (died 1675), a parliamentary supporter in the Civil War, being described as being 'of Gredington'. The property was sold to the Kenyons, another prominent local family in the late 1670s. The present house is a modern, two-storey brick house, built in plain Georgian style in the early 1980s to replace a large brick house of classical style built in the period 1808-11 but possibly incorporating parts of its 17th- and 18th-century forerunner, which was demolished in stages between 1958 and 1980.

The country house at Bettisfield Park was likewise also owned by a branch of the Hanmer family, from at least the early 17th century, illustrated by Moses Griffiths. The rendered house, with Georgian additions of the late 18th or early 19th century and Italianate belvedere tower of the 1840s was partly demolished in the years after the Second World War.

Key historic landscape characteristics

'the enclosures are small, and the fences full of fine oak timber, of nearly one hundred years' growth, which gives to the scenery, especially near Gredington, a stately magnificence of character'.

The history and development of the landscape of the area is inextricably linked with that of the country houses belonging to two prominent local families. The former parkland at Bettisfield perhaps has their origin in the later 16th or earlier 17th centuries. The high pale around a deer park at Bettisfield is said to have been removed in 1914, much of the land of the former park now being given over to agriculture leaving the late 18th-century stables with pediment and cupola, and mid 19th-century water tower, kitchen gardens and farm buildings. The landscape park at Gredington appears to have been first laid out in the early 19th nineteenth century though traces of ridge and furrow show that ultimately it owes its origin to the enclosure of former medieval open field. It is thought that landscaping may initially have involved little more than the construction of driveways and the removal of field boundaries existing at that time, leaving some of the larger hedgerow trees in place, with the addition of entrances and lodges in the later 19th century.

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