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Book Extract | The English Landscape Garden: Hafod, Ceredigion

On Tuesday 19 November, author Tim Richardson joins us to celebrate the launch of his new book The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia.

One of the landscapes featured in the book is Hafod, in Ceredigion, the first time this important landscape has been published with accompanying photography. We are pleased to share this exclusive extract:

‘C’est un paradis’ – so wrote Thomas Johnes to his friend Robert Liston in 1771. He was describing Hafod Uchtryd, a poorly appointed estate in an obscure corner of south-west Wales in the high hills of Ceredigion (Cardiganshire) near the Cambrian Mountains. Nine years later he would inherit it, together with a great fortune and much more property. Johnes wrote in French because he and Liston (a future diplomat) had lived in Paris as part of their Grand Tour, and liked to communicate in this way as a kind of souvenir of that carefree time. The use of French was ironically suitable to Johnes’s theme, because Hafod appeared – to his family and to most of his contemporaries – about as far removed from Parisian sophistication as it was possible to be. To a conventional sensibility, it most certainly was not a ‘paradis’.

Racked by terrific storms, winds and floods, the overgrazed, open hillsides appeared bare and unforgiving, sparsely populated and fraught with desperate poverty. The land was considered suitable only for sheep or possibly the hard business of mining, while the nearest place that represented, to English eyes, an approximation of civilization was the coastal port of Aberystwyth, 26 km (16 miles) to the west.

Obscurely situated amid bleak hills, a hard half-day’s ride from anywhere along poorly made tracks, Hafod would have felt very nearly cut off from civilization. But for Johnes, this was all part of the attraction. His invocation of paradise was in no way ironic, because he could see the setting’s potential: the deep valley of the mall but feisty River Ystwyth – in places narrowing to a gorge – with endless tumbling cascades and a number of impressive waterfalls. Johnes was well versed in the emerging doctrines of the Picturesque – his first cousin was Richard Payne Knight, one of the movement’s great theorists in the 1790s – and he saw that Hafod represented an unmatchable opportunity to present raw nature in all its fierce and beautiful majesty. Independent-minded to the
point of contrariness, Johnes chose to make this ‘beggarly estate’ his home almost to spite the rest of his family, most of whom could not understand why he would not wish to live in comfort at the family’s primary seat, Croft Castle in Herefordshire, which his father had fitted up in the most fashionable Gothic taste. Or at any of the other more salubrious estates they owned. But Johnes had a vision for Hafod, and he was willing to do almost anything – and pay almost anything – to achieve it. That he managed to do so was a marker of his quite extraordinary determination, to the point of obsessiveness. The result – a ‘fairy scene’, as he himself put it – became nationally famous from the 1790s, attracting hundreds of ‘Picturesque tourists’ over the ensuing decades, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and John Ruskin.

Johnes came from an old Welsh family on his father’s side but he was himself culturally English, having been born in Ludlow and educated at Shrewsbury and Eton. (That is why this garden in Wales is included in a book about the ‘English’ landscape garden.) His grandmother on his father’s side was the sole heiress of the Knight family fortune, bringing a dowry of £70,000 (at least £11 million today) when she married into the Johnes family in 1746. Two generations of Knights, as Shropshire ironmasters, had by this time made their riches in the early Industrial Revolution. This inheritance enabled Johnes to realize his Welsh landscape fantasy.

He moved to Hafod with his first wife, but she died just three years into their marriage. Johnes went abroad for a short period but on his return in 1783 married again, taking as his second wife his cousin Jane, daughter of his father’s brother. The couple kept their union secret from the family – and for good reason, as Johnes’s mother in particular was scandalized at her son marrying such a close relative, and barely communicated with him again. Their only child, a daughter named Maria Anne (always known as Mariamne), was born the following year – possibly less than nine months after the marriage – but it was another year before the family knew of her existence, or indeed of this union of cousins. The backdrop of family disapproval, and possibly the timing of the birth, was a contributing factor in their decision to use this obscure estate as their primary residence.

It was clearly important to Johnes that Hafod came to him via his mother’s family, the Herberts, and not as part of the Knight inheritance. As he wrote to Liston in 1783:

This place appears more beautiful than ever. I long most exceedingly to shew it to you … My friends I understand are scolding me confoundedly for living here and quitting Croft. They have houses of their own and do not consider what importance that monosyllable own gives to a place … Now was I to go to Croft … & was I to cut down any trees which I certainly should do, to make walks etc., this would soon be misrepresented, and I a poor tenant at will should be served with an ejectment. This place is my own, and I trust when finished will realise my idea of resembling a fairy scene.

The landscape garden was just one element of his ambitions for the estate. He immediately commissioned a fantasy house in the Gothic manner – suitable to the Picturesque mode – though in the event his architect, Thomas Baldwin of Bath, proved more comfortable working in the neoclassical style of that city, and produced something of a hybrid. The impression of a melange only increased after 1793, when Johnes engaged John Nash to design an octagonal library with a domed roof, a precursor of his design for the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. The resulting house, with its pinnacles, crenellations and Gothic tracery, set on level ground with views down a fertile and well-wooded valley, would have appeared utterly extraordinary to visitors who had just travelled for miles across tracts of barren hill country. A carriage would enter the estate and then wind its way along the side of the valley, providing tantalizing glimpses of the river, before passing through an opening that had been blown through solid rock, resulting in a bursting view of the house set on its plateau above. The house burned down in 1807, and it was a measure of Johnes’s bloody-minded determination (and access to cash) that he had it rebuilt again straight away, at larger scale, by the same architect – with certain fire-aware alterations, such as ground-floor bedrooms and metal doors to the library.

He also commissioned a new church for the estate, designed by James Wyatt, with an altarpiece by the celebrated painter Henry Fuseli. The house was finally demolished by dynamite in 1958; the
cellars and plenty of rubble remain. The church survives, its interior restored following a fire in 1932.

Spending freely, Johnes acquired hundreds of French, Italian and Welsh manuscripts and books; he was himself engaged with translating medieval French chronicles. Johnes was also concerned with agriculture and the ‘improvement’ of his 5,261-ha (13,000-acre) estate, 2,023 ha (5,000 acres) of which he farmed himself, attempting diversifications such as cheese-making, wheat growing and cattle breeding, and winning multiple awards from the Society of Arts.

He issued a manual, printed in English- and Welsh-language versions on his private printing press, entitled ‘A Cardiganshire Landlord’s Advice to his Tenants’ (1800), dispensing information on topics such as manuring and crop rotation; among his friends who were notables in this sphere were Thomas Coke of Holkham Hall and the 5th Duke of Bedford at Woburn. Local people were also the recipients of Johnes’s largesse in the form of work on the estate, food supplies during famine, medical care and schooling. Jane Johnes played her part, instituting a class for sewing, knitting and spinning for the wives and daughters of tenants, who were also taught to read and write. Johnes served as a local MP in the liberal Whig interest and was lord lieutenant of the county.

Perhaps his greatest contribution to the estate was in tree planting: the barrenness on the hills that was so noticeable when he arrived was overcome by the addition of some five million trees between 1784 and 1811. This was planting on an astonishing scale, even for the time. The trees were mainly larches and pines on the upper slopes and summits of the hills, and deciduous species (chiefly oak, beech and sweet chestnut) lower down and on the banks of the Ystwyth, where there was already established ancient woodland including mossy old oaks. Some of the beeches were ‘bundle-planted’, with three or more whips in the same hole so they intertwined as they grew. The pleasant shock of coming across such a highly cultivated estate was described by Johnes’s friend George Cumberland in his quaintly named ‘An Attempt to Describe Hafod’ (1796): ‘Entering these mountains, like the prelude to some scene of enchantment, we are presented, with contrast that is really awful; our winding road hanging on the precipitous sides of steep, smooth and mighty hills … continuing these scenes for some miles, with little variety … The crisped heads of Havod’s woods now burst all at once on the astonished eye.’ The winding road from Rhayader presents much the same impression today – the journey to this remote location remains a crucial part of the overall landscape experience. We have not even come to the ‘garden’ yet, but it is important to register that Johnes did so much more at Hafod than create a Picturesque landscape fantasy. He used his wealth to completely transform a ‘worthless’ estate, and also the lives of the people who worked it. The landscape garden he developed across a small part – about 500 ha (1,236 acres) – of the Ystwyth Valley was only the ornament to these other activities, though it was to become its most famous asset.

Tim Richardson will be in conversation with chief executive of the National Garden Scheme George Plumptre for the launch of The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia on Tuesday 19 November. Available to attend in person or watch online (live or on demand): book tickets

Photos Clive Boursnell
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