Boultibrooke is located to the immediate north of Presteigne, on the English border. It is notable for the survival of its attractive early nineteenth-century wooded pleasure grounds and gardens in the picturesque Lugg valley contemporary with the additions made to an older house by the famous Orientalist Sir Harford Jones Brydges in the early nineteenth century. 

Boultibrooke House (nprn 30470) is set on a wooded terrace which faces south overlooking fields which run down to the river Lugg. The grounds are a roughly square area bounded by the B4355 on the west and elsewhere by woodland margins. Their early history is unclear. Although land attached to the original farm was recorded in 1587 most of the gardens as they survive today appear, from the age of the ornamental plantings, to date from about the early or mid nineteenth-century.

The grounds are entered from the west off the B4355, at an entrance with lodge (30471). The drive follows a north-east course then curves south towards the house, passing through informal woodland which extends east of the drive down a steep slope to a narrow water meadow in the stream valley below. The woodland is mixed, with some notable Victorian tree plantings. The drive, just before it reaches the house, splits into two, either side of a small triangular formal garden with a central pond and fountain surrounded by lawn and shrubs.

Along the south front of the house is a split-level grass terrace, once partly used for a tennis  or croquet  lawn. In the centre of this area is a rectangular pool and, nearby, a group of ornamental plantings. Adjacent on the west, immediately in front of the west wing, there is a vegetable garden, in existence since c.1950, and a greenhouse. Conjoining that on the south is a rectangular hedged garden. To the west of the house is overgrown shrubbery leading into woodland. The slope south of the house is now obscured by natural woodland interspersed with a few notable mature ornamental trees.
At the foot of the terrace there is at least one massive Cedar of Lebanon which, in size, appears to predate Harford Jones Brydges's tenure and may be a relic of an earlier landscape design.

The picturesque landscape extends beyond the house to the west further along the Lugg valley, and to the south down to the river. Some 350m to the west of the house, at SO30786555, are the remains of a rectangular walled kitchen garden once laid out with perimeter and cross paths and glass houses. Air photos indicate the area has been redeveloped with housing and private gardens though some original walling may survive. 

Sources:
Cadw 1999: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Powys, 14-16 (ref: PGW (Po)23(POW)).
Google Earth satellite imagery (accessed 17.08.2021).
Ordnance Survey first-edition 25-inch map, sheet: Herefordshire V.15 (1887).
RCAHMW air photos: 965070/68-9.

RCAHMW, 20 April 2022