Hen Gwrt Moated Site
Hen Gwrt,, Llantilio Crossenny, Monmouthshire is the site of a thirteenth century manor house and a sixteenth century hunting lodge. Originally constructed for the Bishops of Llandaff, it subsequently came into the possession of the Herberts of Raglan Castle. The bishops constructed a substantial manor house on the site in the thirteenth century, which was moated in the fourteenth. The building was then adapted by the Herberts to create a lodge within their extensive hunting grounds. The lodge continued in use until the slighting of Raglan Castle in the English Civil War.
Historical accounts of Monmouthshire traditionally identify Hen Gwrt as the home of Dafydd Gam, the legendary opponent of Owain Glyndŵr and supporter of Henry V, but there is no evidence for this.
Work at the site in the early nineteenth showed evidence of the footings of the earlier buildings, which were mapped, but by the time of subsequent archaeological investigations in the twentieth century, all of the stone on the site had been removed for road metalling. Today, no trace of either the manor or the lodge remains, and the moated site is in the care of CADW.
History
In the Middle Ages ownership of the parish of Llantilio Crossenny was divided between the King and the Bishops of Llandaff, Llantelyo regis being the lands owned by the king and Llantelyo episcopi being those owned by the bishops. The bishops administered their portion from Hen Gwrt. This episcopal presence also accounts for the "exceptional scale" and "unusual grand" of the parish church, dedicated to St Teilo, which stands a little south of Hen Gwrt. The bishops' manor is believed to have been of timber construction.By the reign of Henry VI, the manor had been leased to William ap Thomas who had purchased the manor of Raglan in 1432 and begun the great expansion of the castle. William, or possibly his son, William Herbert, enclosed a substantial deer park, of some 250 hectares, at Llantilio Crossenny. Elisabeth Whittle's Historic Gardens of Wales reproduces a map of 1610 by John Speed that shows the deer parks of Monmouthshire, including that centred at Hen Gwrt. In the Herbert's ownership, in the sixteenth century, the bishops' timber manor was reconstructed as a stone hunting lodge.
William Herbert was the grandson of Dafydd Gam, through his father's second marriage to Gwladys ferch Dafydd Gam, and this familial connection may account for the long-held tradition, repeated by both William Coxe and Sir Joseph Bradney, that Hen Gwrt was the site of Daffyd Gam's manor house. In his Introduction to The Diary of Walter Powell of Llantilio Crossenny in the County of Monmouth, Gentleman, Bradney records that David Gam's; "seat was the castle called Hengwrt, of which only the moat remains." The church at Llantilio Crossenny has two stained glass windows, moved from Llantilio Court, showing the arms of Gam and of Herbert, but there is no documentary evidence linking Gam to the Hen Gwrt site.
In 1646, towards the end of the First English Civil War and after a three-month siege, Raglan Castle was surrendered to the Parliamentary forces of Thomas Fairfax by Henry Somerset, 1st Marquess of Worcester. The surrender, and subsequent slighting, of the castle also saw the end of the use of Hen Gwrt as a hunting lodge and its subsequent complete destruction.
In 1941, Sir Henry Mather Jackson, whose grandfather, Sir William Jackson had bought the site in 1873, and who had also owned White Castle, gave guardianship of Hen Gwrt to the Ministry of Public Building and Works. In that year, it was also designated a scheduled monument. It is now in the care of CADW.
Description
The site comprises an island, rectangular in plan, and measuring 39m by 45m. The island is completely surrounded by a moat, giving dimensions of 72.5m by 76m overall, and is connected by a modern bridge over the moat, although a beam from the original bridge survives. The site offers no natural defences, and the platform within the moat has not been raised, suggesting that the moat was not intended to serve a serious defensive purpose.Describing Hen Gwrt in his 2016 walking guide Offa's Dyke Pass, Mike Dunn writes; "the moat is clogged with bulrushes but still very picturesque and the site is open and grassy."