Cyfarthfa Castle, a Romantic mansion (nprn 18504), is surrounded by Victorian parkland, converted from private to public park, with formal gardens. Its survival marks it as the most historically important iron-master's home in Wales, built and developed immediately next to the ironworks by members of the Crawshay family. Both park and gardens are of great interest not only as the landscape setting for the mansion but also for their proximity and usefulness to the ironworks (34078), which in their day were considered to add great sublimity to its landscape setting. By 1873 the park had assumed its present layout. It became a public park in 1910.
The park was begun when the house was built in 1825. An early drawing of the house (1820s) shows a natural landscape around the house, with none of the formality that was to follow. However, by the time of the 1st edition Ordnance Survey map (1873) the park had assumed its present layout. Early twentieth-century photographs of the ironworks and park show a well-wooded, mature landscape park in a rural setting, apart from the ironworks. The park is roughly oval in shape, elongated north-south, with the highest ground in the middle. The park contains a range of landscape and ornamental features, both original and post-1910.
The house is approached by a drive flanked by conifers leading up to the terrace/forecourt in front of the house. A small garden lies around the house on its south-west and south-east, and there is a kite-shaped kitchen garden to the north-west, now partly in use as a visitor car park. Below the terrace is a fountain of artificial stone (23072).
Behind the house is a belt of woodland with gravel and earthen paths (‘Garden Wood’ & ‘Castle Wood’) extending to the north-west corner of the park. It has areas of both coniferous and deciduous trees, rhododendron, and underplanting of laurel and yew. In the Castle Wood area is a series of four narrow elliptical ponds, one above the other, former reservoirs, and above these an ice-house (405524). Above the woodland to the east are five parallel rows of mature pines running north-east from the wood to a tarmac drive which crosses the park from the north to the south-east boundaries and is lined with birch and sycamore trees.
To the south-east of the house the park consists of unfenced grass with a few isolated trees, school playing fields, a terraced bowling green (with clubhouse), hard tennis courts, and a bandstand. Below the house to the south-west the park is a smooth grass slope dotted with oak, beech and sycamore and below, adjacent to the boundary, a sinuous lake. Originally the lake reached as far as the main drive but this end has been filled in.
On the early Ordnance Survey maps the landscape is remarkable for the number of glasshouse and conservatory space, both in the kitchen garden and in the enclosure immediately to the north-east of the house, all now gone.
Sources:
Cadw 2000: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Glamorgan (ref: PGW(Gm)1(MER).
Ordnance Survey 25-inch plans, Sheet Glamorgan LI.1, editions of 1873 and 1901.
RCAHMW, 6 July 2022