The ruins of medieval Lamphey Palace are located about 2km to the east of Pembroke (nprn 422223). The site is notable for the survival of major elements of an extensive and sophisticated medieval ornamental landscape around the palace ruins. Parkland features include a grand, water-flanked approach and a well-preserved and elaborate fishpond complex. A later, walled deer park survives within the medieval park. The Palace changed hands at the reformation and continued as a noble house into the seventeenth century, declining thereafter. In the nineteenth century the site was laid out as a garden (265874) associated with the classical mansion, Lamphey Court, erected to the north-west (22219).

Lamphey Palace, part of the estate of the bishops of St David’s, was one of the wealthiest residences of the medieval period in Britain. Its extensive park probably dates from the thirteenth century. It lay to the north and east of the palace on undulating land between the Lamphey to Penally (Ridgeway) road on the south, a wooded valley known as The Coombes on the east, Deerpark Lane on the north and a boundary running north from the palace to Deerpark Lane on the west. The main approach was from the village to the south and passed over a bridge and dam that ponded back the valley bottom stream into a lake, providing an appropriate setting to the palace buildings and its grounds. Medieval records list assets which included a wide range of livestock animals together with woodland, fishponds, two watermills and a windmill. There was grazing within for '60 great beasts, as well as the wild animals'. Originally it was bounded by a bank and inner ditch, topped with a timber pale, but was later reduced and enclosed with a stone wall some time before 1811. The interior is now subdivided but field names suggest that this was also the case for the medieval park. It is probable that part of a stone barn at Lamphey Lodge, situated at the highest point of the park, is all that remains of the park lodge.

In the woods on the western edge of the park are the earthworks of four fishponds, probably medieval servatoria, or holding ponds for fish ready for the table. There are also the ruins of a fish larder house. Within the valley woodland to the north are four rectangular ponds, stepped down the floor of the valley, one above the other. These are thought to be the four vivaria, or breeding ponds, mentioned in early records.

Walled courts of the medieval gardens survive (see 407112). In the early nineteenth century further landscaping involved the conversion of the palace precinct into an elaborate garden, traces of which remain, and further landscaping around it, most of which remains. The palace buildings and enclosures were reused for the grounds and gardens of Lamphey Court (265874), north-west of the palace, where the nineteenth-century layout of its gardens survive more or less unaltered (700058).

Sources:
Cadw 2002: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, 234-9 (ref: PGW(Dy)34(PEM)).

RCAHMW, 4 March 2022