The sale of one of Powys’s most elegant country houses, Grade II-listed Ffrwdgrech House near Brecon, in the foothills of the Brecon Beacons, marks the end of a remarkable 134-year association of four generations of the Evans family with one of South Wales’s most picturesque country estates.
Knight Frank (01432 273087) quote a guide price of £3.75 million for the classic eight-bedroom Regency house set in 355 acres of wonderful gardens, parkland, and woodland, which comes with two stable courtyards, two secondary houses, a lodge and a two-bedroom bothy.
There has been a house at Ffrwdgrech since 1560, but, according to its listing, the present one was built by the architect Robert Lugar for the Church Pearce family, on ‘a virgin site’ specifically chosen for its spectacular views of the Brecon Beacons. Lugar was born in Colchester, but did his most important work in Scotland and Wales, where he was employed by leading industrialists to design grand country houses, such as Cyfarthfa Castle, built for the Crawshay family in 1824. In 1828, he designed Ffrwdgrech House as a mirror image of the rectory at Yaxham, Norfolk, which was built at the same time.
In the 1880s, the property was bought by David Evans, owner of the successful Wilkins Co private bank, which had branches throughout West Wales and was bought by Lloyds Bank in 1890. According to his great-grandson, Michael Evans, the current owner of Ffrwdgrech House, Evans was well established financially when, at the age of 53, he married a young wife and went on to raise their family of eight children in some style at Ffrwdgrech, where he built a huge servants’ wing to the west of the existing house, more than doubling its size. He also increased the size of the estate from 600 acres to some 6,500 acres.
A man of considerable energy and foresight, he also embarked on a major tree-planting programme, both in the park, created when the house was first built, and in the grounds. These can be split into two main areas: an open area of lawn and pond to the south of the house, and, to the north and east, an ornamentally laid-out and planted wooded valley, which, together, provide picturesque woodland walks and a dramatic foreground to the park and the mountains beyond.
The oldest of the many splendid specimen trees are the beech, ash and horse chestnut planted in the 1830s. Others, planted at the end of the century, include silver firs, Austrian pines, Californian redwoods, Douglas firs, western red cedars and Japanese maples.
Rhododendrons and azaleas were added in the early 1900s. Many of Ffrwdgrech’s most exotic plants and trees were brought back from overseas by David Evans’s son, Jack, an enthusiastic traveller and plant-collector from the age of 18, who later became president of the Royal Forestry Society. He was, above all, a passionate country sportsman, an expert fly-fisher and foxhunter, who spent his summers fishing for salmon on the nearby Usk or on a private beat of the prolific Namsen River in Norway. His winters were devoted to hunting, notably with the Brecon and Radnor hunt, which he founded.
During his tenure, the Ffrwdgrech estate shrank somewhat in size, ending up rather closer to its present acreage than that of his father’s day. ‘Hunting is a very expensive pastime,’ comments his grandson wryly. Michael Evans’s father, William Douglas (‘Dai’) Evans inherited the family’s love of the land. He trained in estate management and became Lord Derby’s land agent, overseeing the Derby family’s Knowsley estate at North Preston and their famous Newmarket stud-farm. And the present owner of Ffrwdgrech House spent much of his working life with Jones Lang Wootton in Australia, returning to take over the family estate in 1992.
Since then, Mr Evans and his wife, Elizabeth, have been the devoted custodians of this wonderful place which, in all probability, few people outside Wales have ever heard of, let alone learned how to pronounce its name. Ffrwdgrech means ‘rippling stream’ in English, a fact highlighted by the well-preserved Victorian pleasure garden with its picturesque landscape of lawns and trees, waterfalls and streams -a landscape of sufficient historical importance to merit its own separate Grade II listing.
The launch onto the market of East Blagdon Farm in the heart of the Cranborne Chase AONB, near Wimborne, Dorset-through Strutt Parker (01722 328741) at a guide price of ‘excess £5m’ for the whole- recalls the family’s successes on the racecourse and in the show ring since the late Thalia Gordon- Watson inherited the farm from her father, Charles, in 1958.
Thereafter, Mrs Gordon-Watson extended and improved the house, which sits in a natural amphitheatre in the centre of its 233 acres of land and woodland, and founded the Blagdon dynasty of champion show ponies, which helped to launch her daughter, Mary (now Mrs David Low), on her path to a team gold medal as a member of the winning British eventing team at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
East Blagdon was first enclosed as a royal park in 1321 and extended by Edward IV in 1483 to improve the hunting. It was ‘disparked’ in 1570 when the lands were granted to John Scuddamore, and later became part of the 23,000-acre Boveridge estate bought by Charles Gordon in 1910.
Built of brick and flint under a clay-tile roof, East Blagdon Farmhouse, listed Grade II , probably dates from the mid 18th century, with earlier origins.
It has four reception rooms, eight bedrooms, three bathrooms and a onebedroom annexe, and comes with three cottages, a charming stable courtyard and a range of farm buildings. The land is divided by traditional paddock fencing and surrounded by ancient woodland that includes a rare yew wood.
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Rub shoulders with the Dukes of Buccleuch
Edinburgh-based agents Goldsmith Co (0131- 476 6500) quote a guide price of ‘offers over £535,000′ for rose-pink, higgledy-piggledy Low Farthingbank House near Thornhill, Dumfries Galloway, the only freehold property to exist within the curtilage of the Duke of Buccleuch’s Drumlanrig Castle estate.
Once home to six families of estate workers, including the head chef, the head gardener and the blacksmith, Low Farthingbank was built in the 1870s of the same local stone as Drumlanrig Castle itself. Set in 1.9 acres of mature gardens and grounds within a protected landscape of exceptional beauty, the house has three reception rooms, a garden room, a farmhouse kitchen, six bedrooms and four bath/shower rooms. Outbuildings include two sets of stables, a workshop, a greenhouse and a double garage.
‘With salmon fishing on the River Nith and extensive country pursuits available nearby, this is an ideal opportunity for a sporting-orientated purchaser,’ suggests selling agent George Goldsmith
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