Vaynol Park is a walled coastal landscape park located on the Menai Straits to the south-west of Bangor. The present park was laid out in the 1820s but occupies a site with a longer history of construction and landscape design, and was originally a possession of the Bishops of Bangor. Vaynol Old Hall (NPRN 31463) dates from the sixteenth century. It was replaced on a nearby site by the larger Vaynol Hall (17017) in the late eighteenth century by Thomas Assherton who established the park, initially as a fox-hunting estate. Its high stone wall was built in the 1860s (401849).

There were once five entrances to the park. All survive though only two, off the B4547 on the south-east side, now have drives in use leading to the house. The main entrance is the northernmost at Grand Lodge with its arched entrance over iron gates (407406). The drive, first passing through a cutting, is lined with different varieties of trees, arriving at the house at a turning circle at its front. The southern drive begins at gate piers by Bryntirion Lodge. From near the entrance a branch drive follows a route round the south corner of the park to the boat house at the dock on the Strait (below).

Several stretches of water were dotted across the park. The largest to survive is the lake with three artificial islands and a boat house, located just south of the Hall; this was created in the 1880s and has recently been restored. Others lie nearby, north-east of the drive, and in Hendre-Las covert, and in Sealpond Wood in the business park area, and elsewhere there. 

A well-preserved walled and terraced Elizabethan garden, the Old Hall garden, survives at the centre of the park (86511). Later gardens include the early twentieth-century water garden; the rose garden, also post-1900 but lying over a previously lawned garden area; and a walled kitchen garden (pre-1855) which contained an orchard and also some glass houses, now mostly gone. The Butler's House lies within a garden enclosure.
Other structures within the park include various outbuildings, estate cottages, two chapels, a large model farm (31455), a dairy, a mausoleum (420202), a folly viewing tower (23005), a small dock (411204) and a boat house. A limestone quarry (421943) lies in woodland at the south end of the park and a kiln lies near the dock (421940). The Old Hall is being restored.
The park includes several dispersed areas of woodland, mainly copses and coverts, some commercially managed for timber. The north-east corner of the park has become a business park though most of the nineteenth-century plantings have survived.

Source:
Cadw 1998, Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales: Conwy, Gwynedd and Anglesey (ref: PGW (Gd) 52 (GWY).

RCAHMW, 30 October 2017