LLWYN-CELYN
Site Details
© Copyright and database right 2020. All rights reserved. Ordnance Survey licence number 0100022206
NPRN 45109
Map Reference SO32SW
Grid Reference SO3094821810
Unitary (Local) Authority Monmouthshire
Old County Monmouthshire
Community Crucorney
Type of Site FARMSTEAD
Broad Class DOMESTIC
Period Post Medieval, Medieval
Site Description 1. Llwyn-Celyn is a late medieval open hall dating to between 1480 and 1500, considered to be one of the most remarkable surviving stone houses in Monmouthshire. Original elements include the open hall itself with a storeyed end and an attached solar block. The latter would originally have been open to the roof, and with other early elements retains smoke blackening on the roof.
Modifications in the seventeenth century include floors and two fireplaces with chimneys in the solar block, and a main chimney stack inserted into the hall backing onto the screens passage.
A high table dated 1690 was recorded in the house in 1906, but is now in Llanthony Abbey House.
RCAHMW, July 2014.
2. The farmhouse was in a state of dereliction when acquired in 2014 by the Landmark Trust who undertook a £4.2m (including £2.5m of HLF funding) restoration of the site, which is now a holiday home. The restoration included extensive study in order better to understand the site, and finds included deliberately secreted leather shoes inside a wall, likely deposited for apotropaic purposes. The site proved difficult to date accuracy with conventional dendrochronology. However, isotope-assisted dendrochronology was utilised for the first time and determined the building to have been completed in 1420. Further analysis also found that the hall was altered, with an upper floor added in 1690.
(Sources: ‘Medieval manor Llwyn Celyn awarded £2.5m HLF grant’, BBC News, 29.07.2015; ‘How the Landmark Trust resurrected one of Wales’s oldest homes’, Financial Times (web article), accessed 14.01.2019; Esther Addley, ‘Welsh farmstead is rare medieval hall house, experts confirm’, Guardian, 13.01.2019)
A.N. Coward, RCAHMW, 14.01.2019


