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Bronwydd
Down a bumpy single track lane a few miles from the busy mid-Welsh town of Newcastle Emlyn is an intriguing ruin. Sporting coloumns, gothic arches, towers and battlements, it looks something like a mediaeval castle, but appearances can be deceiving.
This is Bronwydd, a 'sham castle' built around an earlier house by the esteemed Gothic Revival architect Richard Kyrke Penson (1816-1886) for Sir Thomas Davies Lloyd, 1st Baronet Bronwydd. The 'castle' Penson made out of the existing 18th century house was every bit suited to the self-styled 'Marcher Lord' of Cemais, incorporating a baronial hall in which the family muniments and land titles were displayed. The house was a remarkable creation of turrets, polychrome roofing tiles and carved stone, and the interior was even more elaborate. The rooms featured painted mottoes above the doors, carved stone, stained glass windows and murals.
Such ambitious building programmes did not come cheaply however. In 1877, when Sir Thomas' son Sir Marteine Owen Mowbray Lloyd, 2nd Baronet inherited the estate he was saddled with £100,0000 of debt.
Good management saved the estate from bankruptcy, but the death of Sir Marteine's son, Arundel Keymes Lloyd in the Great War meant the end of the estate. Arundel had been made owner of the estate for tax reasons, but after his death, the Inland Revenue demanded death duties on it.
Without a male heir and overshadowed by crippling debt, Sir Marteine and his wife Lady Katherine subsequently lived away from Bronwydd until Sir Marteine's death in 1933. Now a widow, Lady Lloyd tried to let the house without success. On her death in 1937, the house and grounds were sold. After housing a Jewish boarding school in the Second World War (the Aryeh House School, evacuated from Brighton), the house was stripped and left to decay. The subesquent years saw one of mid-Wales' most tragic architectural losses as slowly Bronwydd collapsed into its own cellars and was then partly demolished.
L-R: North aspect; south aspect; tower; baronial hall mullioned window and baronial hall
L-R: View toward hall window; detail of window with surviving woodwork; débris among the ruins; an engaged arch in the main wing; south door; detail of carved masonry.
L-R: South window, inside the tower; looking up; bay window; chimney breast; looking up again.
The house is in a sorry condition and seems unlikely to last a good deal longer in its present state. The whole place is overgrown and when I visited was pervaded by an unpleasant smell emanating from the carcasses of several dead sheep left among the ruins. There is little trace of the oppulence with which Bronwydd was once finished and as time goes by those traces which remain are being eroded away by the weather - Thomas Lloyd's baronial dream stands broken amidst debris and dunghills in a field of cows.
It is worth noting that the estate church, St. Cynllo's, still survives and is just as lavishly decorated as the house once was. Although the Lloyds had converted to Methodism in the eighteenth century (the old house even contained a private chapel), the family had returned to Anglicanism by the nineteenth. Penson 'restored' the parish church on side of the valley at the same time as the house was rebuilt and extended and this today one of the finest estate churches in Wales.
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