Historic Landscape Characterisation

Maelor Saesneg: Emral
Hanmer and Willington Worthenbury communities
(HLCA 1121)

Former17th-century landscape park with buildings and structures associated with now-demolished country house belonging to important Anglo-Welsh borderland family.

Historic background

During the Civil War the king's forces were billeted at Emral in 1642, possibly within a later medieval hall which had replaced an earlier hall at the site. Sir John Puleston (c. 1583-1659) judge, lived at Emral Hall in 1650s, installed Philip Henry as minister of Worthenbury of which he had bought the advowson, and tutor to his children. Henry lived at Emral until Puleston built him a house at Worthenbury, said of his patron that in renewing leases on the estate he substituted for the customary obligation of keeping a hound or a hawk for the landlord to that of keeping a Bible in the house.

A new larger house was built in about the 1660s, which together with additions in the 1720s and 1890s probably extended over parts of the earlier moat. The house was demolished in 1936 and considered to be a serious architectural loss. Much material was used to fill in the remains of the moat though parts of the house were re-erected at Portmeirion by the architect Clough Williams-Ellis.

Little is known of the early settlement within the character area despite the place-name evidence for Anglo-Saxon settlements of perhaps the 8th to 10th centuries, probably focused on a number of dispersed agricultural manors, Halghton itself, for example, having neither a village nor church. A subsequent phase of settlement is represented by a distinctive group of 5-6 moated sites including those at Halghton Hall, Halghton Lodge, Holly Bush Farm, Lightwood Farm, Bryn, Peartree Lane and possibly at Mulsford Hall, which were no doubt originally associated with timber halls which have long since vanished above ground. They appear to have been the focus of a number of smaller manors, perhaps established in the wake of the Edwardian conquest of Wales in the later 13th century, and possibly represent a colonising phase of agriculture, during which extensive areas of arable land were first exploited on an intensive scale.

The fieldscapes within the character area are dominated by strip fields and reorganised strip fields of medieval origin, many of which are associated with ridge and furrow, together with other field patterns including both large and small regular fields which may have originated from the enclosure of former open fields. Little documentary evidence of the organisation of the open fields has survived , though reference was made to open field strips in Willington in the 15th century. Modern land use is predominantly grassland, fields being characteristically defined by multi-species hedges with scattered mature hedgerow oaks.

Later settlement, probably largely dating from the early post-medieval period onwards, is represented by a number of linear settlements that grew up along roadsides and near important road junctions, such as those at Holly Bush, Little Cloy and Halghton Lane.

Early halls assumed to have been associated with the moated sites were replaced chronologically and occasionally on adjacent sites by a series of 16th- to 17th-century timber-framed farmhouses such as Buck Farm, Willington Cross, The Dukes, The Fields, The Bryn, and Peartree Farm, which were generally extended in brick in the later 17th to early 19th centuries. Other farmhouses such as those Mulsford Hall and Holly Bush Farm are characteristic substantial brick-built farmhouses of the mid and later 18th century.

Key historic landscape characteristics

A large oval enclosure marks the boundary of the small landscape park, probably of 18th-century origin, which once surrounded the former hall. There are widespread traces of ridge and furrow cultivation within the parkland boundary which probably represent medieval open field contemporary with the medieval hall and moated site, first emparked in perhaps the 17th or 18th century. Present-day land use is predominantly grassland, subdived by post and wire fences.

Sources