RECENTLY, it was announced that Aberglasney Gardens had been named one of the best rated places by Trip Advisor, who gave it a Traveller’s Choice Award for the second year in a row.

To celebrate this, we take a look at the history of Aberglasney and get into the spooky October mood by highlighting the ghostly goings on reported at the venue.

The history of Aberglasney

The first mention of gardens on the site in Llanarthney comes from a poem dated in the medieval times where ‘nine green gardens’ are spoken of. There is more documentation in the mid-1500s when William ap Thomas was around. He was the first High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire in 1541-2 and he added the Aberglasney chapel to Llangathen Church.

At the time, it is thought the site was known as Llys Wen and was sold to Anthony Rudd at some point in the late 1500s or early 1600s (believed to be after 1594 when Anthony Rudd was consecrated as Bishop of St Davids).

Rudd, alongside his son Sir Rice Rudd are credited with rebuilding Aberglasney and creating the famous Elizabethan Cloister Garden.

In 1670, there were 30 hearths in the house – found during an assessment for Hearth Tax – and believed to be one of the biggest in the county.

However, it did not bode well for the Rudd family as Sir Rice had overspent on the renovations which put the family in mounting debt, with Sir Rice Rudd junior (Sir Rice’s grandson) mortgaged the estate.

In 1710, it was bought by Robert Dyer, a successful lawyer in Carmarthenshire. He is the one who remodelled the house in the Queen Anne style of the day.

He left the majority of the gardens untouched, but did remove the forecourt wall, moving it from where it connected to the gatehouse, leaving that as a stand alone garden feature.

In 1798, the estate is advertised for sale with 584 acres after the Dyer family also ran into debt.

In the Victorian era, the estate was home to the Phillips and Walters Philipps families. Thomas Phillips retired from his role as head surgeon at the Honourable East India Company and bought the estate. During this time, the present external appearance of the mansion was formed including the addition of the portico and bay windows and the altered roof line.

Thomas Phillips died childless in 1824 and Aberglasney was left to John Walters, his nephew. He added the Philipps name to his, but spelt it differently. His granddaughter Marianne Emily Jane Pryse would become his heiress and for most of her life married to soldier Charles Mayhew, they let out Aberglasney but returned to the estate after Mayhew’s retirement.

Marianne would move to London in 1908 after the death of her husband and following her own death in 1939, the property went into her step siblings’ family through her father’s second marriage.

It went on to Eric Evans but between 1939 and 1945, it was requisitioned by the Army, as were many manor homes during the Second World War. Eric died at the age of 30 in around 1950, leaving the estate to his young son. But the estate would be split up as his son’s trustees decided the property was not economically viable and potentially even unlucky.

Carmarthen lawyer David Charles bought the house and farm and there was another sale in 1977 of part of the estate.

Aberglasney was then left to ruin and be the victim of vandalism before it was rescued by the Aberglasney Restoration Trust. The trust bought the house and gardens in 1995 using money donated by American benefactor Frank Cabot.

William Wilkins CBE – who founded the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust – oversaw the restoration plans and was key to the fundraising.

Aberglasney’s initial restoration was completed in a very short amount of time due to individual donors, trust funds, charitable donations and grant money being made available and Aberglasney opened to the public on July 4, 1999.

Throughout the next decade, restoration work continued, with the ground floor of the mansion being completed in 2013 and the Old Piggeries restoration project in 2016. There is also work to restore the upper floors of the mansion. The mansion and gardens are both Grade II listed.

Ghosts

Like many old buildings, Aberglasney is said to be home to a number of ghosts, with spookyisles.com stating it is reportedly haunted by between 90 and 120 ghosts.

The Blue Room is said to be one of the most haunted in the mansion, with visitors saying that they were touched by invisible hands in the room and seeing the ghostly faces of the five maids who died there when a stove was left on to help with the drying of plaster and the maids suffocated. In the 1930s, workers were brought in to cut the ivy back from the outside of the house and when they began working on the window to the Blue Room, were reportedly met with five females dressed in Victorian clothing looking back at them.

A number of people also reported feeling a sudden fear and eerie coldness at the Pigeon House Wood near the back of the grounds and hearing disembodied . In 1999, a medium visited the site and said it was being haunted by a murdered fugitive. He spent his last moments trying to evade capture but was shot on the grounds.

It also appears that former owner Thomas Phillips never left the property, with gardeners and butlers stating they have seen his ghost over the years following his 1824 death. It was thought he had cursed the owners and grounds as the subsequent owners were subject to bad luck and many children in the house died during infancy.

The house is also said to have been the site for glimpses of ‘corpse candles’, phantom candles that were seen to appear in a room and flicker before a tragedy that would end in death. These candles are said to have appeared in front of the housekeeper before the maids died and have been reported to have appeared prior to other tragedies too.

There has also been a sighting of a young girl cooking in the basement.

The reported sightings attracted a lot of attention in the early 200s as on November 4, 2003, the Most Haunted TV show aired an episode in Aberglasney.