Shirenewton Hall
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| Shirenewton Hall | |
|---|---|
 The gates to the hall. The hall itself is not visible from the public highway. | |
  Location within Monmouthshire | |
| General information | |
| Location | Shirenewton, Monmouthshire, Wales |
| Coordinates | 51°38′13.56″N 2°45′5.4″W / 51.6371000°N 2.751500°W |
| Technical details | |
| Floor area | 18,000 square feet (1,700 m2) |
| Design and construction | |
| Designations | Grade II listed / Cadw/ICOMOS Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales |
Shirenewton Hall, originally Shirenewton Court, is a country house and estate adjoining the village of Shirenewton, Monmouthshire, Wales, about 3 miles (4.8 km) west of Chepstow. The 29.5-acre (11.9 ha) estate is located on a hillside, and commands views across the "Golden Valley" to the west and the Severn Estuary in the south. The main building was constructed around 1830, and partly rebuilt around 1900–1910, on the site of an earlier house which was the birthplace of William Blethyn, Bishop of Llandaff. The house is now a Grade II listed building, and the teahouse in the adjoining Japanese garden is listed as Grade II*. The gardens are included on the Cadw/ICOMOS Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales. The estate is not open to the public.
Prior to the construction of Shirenewton Court, an earlier building was occupied since the Middle Ages by the Blethyn (or Bleddyn) family. It was William Blethyn's birthplace, probably around 1520; he died in 1590.[1][2]
Shirenewton Hall was built around 1830 in an Italianate style on or near the site of the older building. It was built for William Hollis by an unknown architect.[3] Hollis, a descendant of an industrialist family who developed paper mills at nearby Mounton, was the Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1831.[1]
About fifty years after Shirenewton Hall's construction, when it was no longer known as Shirenewton Court, the Blethyn family had "descended in the social scale",[1] and sold the property to Edward Joseph Lowe. He was a botanist, horticulturalist, meteorologist and writer who was largely responsible for designing and planting the surrounding gardens. Lowe added two open pavilions, the larger being of sandstone with a glazed tile roof, while the smaller had a copper roof. He also added a summer house with a marble sundial.[3] Lowe wrote many books on the cultivation of woodland ferns and some species of these grow around the churchyard walls at Shirenewton Church.[4]
After Lowe's death in 1900, the estate was sold to Charles Oswald Liddell, a wealthy shipping merchant who traded with China and Japan and who became Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1918. Liddell's renovations included exchanging the Italianate facade with a Jacobean style in 1901. An east wing, added in 1909, was designed by Chepstow architect Norman Evill, a pupil of Edwin Lutyens; it included a billiard room, loggia, and belvedere tower. The north end of the house was also remodeled. Various stones were used during the renovation, including mauve Old Red Sandstone and yellow Bath stone.[3]
In 1988, the BBC television film The Woman He Loved, about the abdication of King Edward VIII, starring Anthony Andrews and Olivia de Havilland and Jane Seymour, was partly shot at the estate.[5][4] The property remains a private home that is not open to the public, although the grounds have occasionally been used for fundraising events.[6] It has been placed on the market for sale on a number of occasions in the 21st century.[7][8][9]