Historic Landscape Characterisation

Bro Trefaldwyn

Ornamental and Picturesque Landscapes and Cultural Associations

The historic landscape character includes a number of distinctive ornamental landscapes, most notably the Lymore character area. This represents a late medieval or early post-medieval hunting park which had probably been established by the Herbert's by at least the late 16th or early 17th century, being shown on some editions of Speed's map of Montgomeryshire published in about 1610. The parkland, which is included in the Register of Parks and Gardens, encompasses substantial areas of ridge and furrow and was almost certainly created by the emparkment of part of the medieval arable open-fields belonging to the town of Montgomery.

The former Lymore Hall, demolished in the early 1930s, was a large late 16th- to early 17th-century timber-framed hall. It was enlarged in about 1675 and used mainly as a sporting lodge, and has been described as 'one of the last and also one of the greatest half timbered mansions in Britain'. During the course of the 18th and 19th centuries several artificial ponds, including a duck decoy pond, appear to have been added to a number of pre-existing natural ponds towards the eastern side of the park, with stands of trees overlying the former open-fields.

Landscape parks were established around a number of other country houses in the area during the 18th and 19th centuries, notably at Mellington Hall, Marrington Hall, Gunley Hall, Edderton Hall, and Nantcribba, walled gardens and orchards being provided at a number of these houses as well as at Walcot, The Gaer, Pen-y-bryn and Pentrenant, with fishponds at Edderton, Marrington and Pen-y-bryn, and lodges and gatehouses at Nantcribba, Marrington and Mellington.

The loss of some areas of former parkland was being regretted by commentators as early as the 1880s, as at Nantcribba where a 'large field, instead of being what it was a century since, namely a park, is nothing but a field' though there were and still are 'some large cedar trees remaining'. Substantial elements of the parkland still survive at Lymore, Gunley and Marrington, though much of Edderton has been lost.