Nanteos (nprn 278), one of the most important eighteenth-century houses in west Wales, is situated in the Nant Paith valley, a few kilometres to the south-east of Aberystwyth. The mansion is set in a medium-sized landscape park (700214).

The garden is located to the immediate east of the house, within the pleasure grounds that surround it (265018). It is a large, walled, rectilinear area, long axis roughly east by west, on ground sloping down from north to south. The walls date from 1814-17 though it was preceded by an earlier, unwalled, kitchen garden. The walls are of brick and stone construction and are mostly intact. They rise to 4m on the east, 4.5m on the the north but fall to 3m at its east end (partly derelict), and 3.5m high on the south. The north wall is of stone internally lined with brick. There are entrances, some blocked, in each wall. 

The interior is grassed over and there are no obvious remains of the former layout of perimeter and cross paths, though traces are visible from the air. Buildings appear to have been mostly removed in recent years. In the centre there were two derelict glasshouses, one above the other, examples of early heated hothouses. The upper one was a vinery with a wooden superstructure on a brick base, with vine arches, accessed by a flight of steps on the west side. It was built against a high wall aligned east-west, its south side of brick, plastered on the inside of the glasshouse, the north side stone. Against the north side were some ruined, roofless, stone bothies. The lower glasshouse, possibly also a vinery, has no superstructure remaining. It was built against a brick wall, behind it a furnace/boiler pit. Nearby was a circular, stone-lined pool, about 2.5m in diameter, with an iron fountain pipe in the middle; a row of brick frames; a melon house; and a roofless, ruined bothy range of rubble stone. It is unclear as to what extent these features now survive.

Sources:
Cadw 2002: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Carmarthenshire, Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire, 86, 89-90 (ref: PGW(Dy)47(CER)).
Ordnance Survey six-inch maps, sheet: Cardiganshire X.NW & X.NE (1886).
Additional notes: C.S.Briggs; D.K.Leighton.

RCAHMW, 2 June 2022