Welsh Journals

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already the 'age of improvement', with the Welsh gentry concerned with better communications and transport, and anxious to deal with the problems of crime and poverty in the community. The gentry who sat on the quarter sessions which sanctioned spending on such country improvements also asked Nash to redesign their country houses, Nash making in this field two rather contradictory achievements. He discovered in this period ways of breaking down the symmetry and thus the excessive formality of interiors, producing plans of great flexibility and ingenuity; but he was also much in demand to transform what were large rustic farmhouses into aristocratic residences, where servants were carefully segregated from masters, and where the gentry apartments were kept wholly separate from the noises, smells and humming activity of the stables and home farm. Keeping to Uannerchaeron as an example, the gentry apartments form only a small elegant section of a vast complex of courts, yards, walled gardens and enclosures. The rebuilding or extension of these villas, and the elaborate adornment of estates betoken great confidence born of high rents and great profits from agrarian improvements at the time of the French Revolutionary wars, or profits from early industry and coastal trading in west Wales. The villas or small country houses are well illustrated here, the one dis- appointment, perhaps, being that there is comparatively little on Ffynone near Boncath, one of Nash's most attractive houses, admittedly drastically altered. Castle House, Aberystwyth, which, wholly altered, forms the core of the 'Old College' on the Promenade at Aberystwyth, is here shown by Dr Suggett to have been a breathtakingly original building. The book has other revelations too, such as Emlyn Cottage, a dower house for the widowed Mrs Brigstocke and her daughters, which sounds too Jane Austenish to be true. Cilgwyn, Newcastle Emlyn, stands on its site today. One sees Rheola too in a new light, because it was built by Nash for his kinsfolk, here shown as thrusting middle-class upstarts, trying to dislodge the older Glamorgan gentry from their niches of power. The book-the Welsh version reads just as well as the English-is a distinguished contribution to the growing literature on architecture in Wales, casting new light on a crucial period when professional architects were beginning to make a living in Wales-one thinks of William Jernegan in Swansea in this period, as a comparable example. Just at the time of writing, the National Trust Welsh newsletter informs us that the builders at Llannerchaeron have discovered a cache of papers, in the rafters beneath the slates, which are connected with the building of the house-a letter of 20 March 1795, for example, to Major Lewis from John Nash ordering special glass of one and a half millimetre's thickness (which is still to be