Historic Landscape Characterisation
Llŷn - Area 19 Pwllheli, Deneio
and Penmaen PRN 33500
Pwllheli
Deneio and Pwllheli
West End, Pwllheli
Pwllheli centre
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Historic background
The evidence for activity in this character
area during prehistory, is limited, A spindle whorl and a stone
tool (PRN 2212, 2213) have been found near Carreg Yr Imbill.
Four exceptionally large orthostats have been recorded, set
in a field bank near Pont Pensarn. It has been suggested that
these stones were once part of a, now demolished, Neolithic
chambered tomb (PRN 438).
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Pwllheli flourished. Pwllheli
was a royal maerdref under the Princes of Gwynedd. A maerdref is a
township in the Prince’s hand and which was organised on ‘manorial’ lines.
It was here that the focus of the Prince’s demesne lands lay
in the commote of Afloegion. There would be a royal hall and other
buildings appropriate to the royal officials who oversaw the management
and tax collection of the Prince’s interests in that commote.
There would be estate workers, tied bond tenants, who would have their
own small plot of land and would also work for a set number of days
on agricultural works on the Lord’s demesne. Because of the restrictive
nature of the estate tenure there could be a tendency for he cottages
of the tir cyfrif bond tenants to cluster in a hamlet. The result would
look very much like a village.
At some point before the conquest in 1283, Pwllheli was granted borough
status. In the earliest records available to us we find 20 burgesses
in the town.
The small township of Penmaen lies to the
west of Pwllheli, in a bend of the Rhydhir. This township was
also held by tir cyfrif estate tenure and the tenants there
would perform the duties that the bond tenants of Pwllheli
were obliged to do. Sixty years later, in the aftermath of
the Black Death, Penmaen was empty and the land lay uncultivated
through lack of tenants. At the end of the thirteenth century,
however, a tax or subsidy assessment was made at Pwllheli and
Penmaen and gives a valuable indication of the productive capacity
of Pwllheli at this time. Penmaen was a very small community
of only three tenants with any moveable wealth. One of the
tenants, however, Teg’ ap Philip, had 8 cattle and 4
sheep in comparison with the other two tenants who had 3 cattle
between them.
In Pwllheli, 21 taxpayers were accounted for. Between these tenants
there were 78 cattle, 24 horses, 44 sheep and 11 draught animals. The
tenants were capable of producing 46 crannocks of flour and grain per
annum.
Of the 21 tenants, 9 had fishing nets (26 nets in total) and two of
the tenants had boats. One of the components of the rent of land in
Pwllheli was the cash value of a mease of herrings. There were also
sums of money which had to be paid for maintaining the Prince’s
hall and houses. The tenants were obliged, moreover, to mill their
corn at the lord’s mill at Deneio, immediately to the north of
the core of Pwllheli and on the higher ground behind.
The borough of Pwllheli was granted to Edmund Dynieton at fee-farm
in 1317. In 1349, Pwllheli was granted to Nigel Loryng, along with
Nefyn at a value of £50. Six years later Pwllheli was enfranchised
as a free borough.
The nucleus of the Medieval borough was sited on the northern side
of the tidal pool, where the basin or inner harbour is now, and where
some of the earliest buildings in Pwllheli have survived; along Strand
Street (now a continuation of the High Street), Kings Head Street and
Penlan Street. The tenements would have extended to the shoreline which,
before enclosure and the embankment, ran from the area of the present
Penmownt Chapel, in a curve towards the roundabout near the Maes.
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In the ‘Pool’ itself there were
vast expanses of sand, hemmed in from the west and east by
extensive sandbanks. Three rivers come together at Penmaen,
the Afon Dwyryd, the Afon Penrhos and the Rhydhir and, from
the east, the Afon Erch joined the Rhydhir just south of the
Borough. (see Lewis Morris’ map of 1748 which provides
a good indication of earlier topography here).
During the Glyndwr rebellion Pwllheli was described as ‘destroyed
and laid waste’ (Jones Pierce, 1972, 156). This was a setback
and Pwllheli did not recover until the end of the fifteenth century.
The burgages were close to the shore, hemmed-in in by an arc of rising
ground to the north. Above this lay residual elements of the manorial
land, focussed, so Professor Jones Pierce has suggested, on the location
of Henllys, 350m north-east of the church of Deneio. The church was
ancient but little is known of its chronology or detail. The church
was about 14m long on a west-east alignment, and 6m wide. There was
a side chapel on the north side at the east end. A new church, St.
Peter’s was built to north of the High Street in 1834 and the
old church at Deneio was demolished in 1859. The nineteenth century
church was replaced on the same High Street site in 1887.
Around 1550 David Lloyd ap Thomas had the
demise of the town of Pwllheli. John Wynne ap Hugh of Bodfel
had Penmaen. The sixteenth century was a period when leases
in Crown and former monastic land could be obtained more readily
by local gentry. Freeholders, from the fifteenth century, were
active in the property market, amalgamating parcels of land
and creating consolidated estates, transforming the landscape
in the process.
Pwllheli had one shop in 1580 (Jones Pierce, 1972, 180). A generation
later there were five. When Pennant visited Pwllheli in the 1770s he
described it as ‘the best town in this county’ and ‘the
magazine of goods which supplies all this tract’. Hyde Hall,
forty years later, noted the amount of grain exported, a commodity
which had only begun to register in that respect, 25 years previously.
He also noted significant improvements in agriculture in the area.
The market prices were reasonable, not only in corn but pigs, cattle
and horses, chickens and eggs. Pwllheli had several fairs in the early
nineteenth century. The August Fair was the largest; three hundred
head of cattle were not unusual (Hyde Hall, 281).
An important craft and trade was shipbuilding. Pwllheli built over
400 ships during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wood’s
1834 map of Pwllheli clearly identifies shipbuilding yards on the north
side of the basin between Penlan and Strand Street.
In 1808 an Act of Parliament was passed in respect of enclosing and
some 3000 acres in the parish of Deneio and the adjacent parishes.
The Act was implemented in 1816. It involved draining land on the shoreline
at Penrhos, Talcymerau and Abererch and constructing two embankments
at each side of the basin.
During the greater part of the nineteenth century most of the development
at Pwllheli extended eastward on the north bank of the Erch and north
and west around St. Peter’s church. On the west side, there was
just the Pwllheli Union Workhouse and a row of terraced houses on the
south side of the road to Penrhos. Hyde Hall, in 1810, noted that 104
new houses had been built in the last ten years but conceded that many
were re-builds on pre-existing sites.
In 1869 the railway came to Pwllheli. This event had an impact on several
interests in the community. It was contributory to the demise of coastal
trading over longer routes such as Liverpool and it was soon to be
instrumental in bringing holidaymakers to the peninsula. In 1909 the
railway was extended westward to the present position of the station,
which required reclaiming a strip of land on the north side of the
basin. There were two routes in and out of Pwllheli. One, the Cambrian
Coast Express via Machynlleth, Shrewsbury and London Paddington and
the other via Afon Wen to Caernarfon and Crewe.
In 1890 a Cardiff entrepreneur, Solomon Andrews, began to develop a
holiday resort on the sand bar of Morfa Garreg, between Talcymerau
Isaf and the Cob (embankment). It is said he brought the stone from
the Llanbedrog quarries on the tramway that his company designed (his
firm were coachbuilders) and transported passengers to the Plas Glyn
y Weddw gallery which Solomon Andrews had purchased as a focus for
art, culture and entertainment. His complex at the West End, Pwllheli
included housing, a golf course and the West End Hotel. During the
course of the twentieth century there has been considerably more infill:
housing estates to the east of the sand spit at Morfa Garreg and to
the west, at Talcymerau road and, north of the Rhydhir, along the road
to Llanbedrog.
Key historic landscape characteristic
•A landscape of the confluence of
three rivers, the Rhydhir, Penrhos and Erch, with their coastal
and estuarine marshes and sand bars, was transformed by Parliamentary
Inclosure and drainage to create the present harbour at Pwllheli.
•A manorial centre of the Welsh Princes
in the thirteenth century retains place-name elements of
the location, close to the church of Deneio on the ridge
above the shoreline.
•The urban landscape at Pwllheli has
developed from and overlies, a thirteenth century borough
from which evidence of the layout may still be discerned
in the present street plan.
•Expansion and development at Pwllheli
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at the
West End was fuelled by an emerging tourist boom.
The boundary of this character area is defined
on the west by the lower reaches of the Afon Penrhos from Towyn
to the river’s confluence at Afon Rhydhir as it opens
out into Pwllheli harbour and the sea. Our boundary follows
the line of the river from a little to the south-west of Yoke
House, turning south-east and south again to the point where
the Afon Erch enters the water of the harbour. The easternmost
boundary of this area is the tongue of sand which reaches eastward
from Carreg yr Imbill.
The landscape of the several rivers, the Penrhos,
the Dwyryd and the Rhydhir in the west and the Erch in the
east, come together in the Pool at Pwllheli (=salt water pool),
with a long sandbar to the south of the Rhydhir and a shorter,
but nevertheless substantial, spit, extending south from the
confluence of the Erch. At low tide there would be extensive
sands in the Pool and along the banks of the rivers. The name
applied to the confluence and estuary of these rivers is Talcymerau
(= the end of confluences) and Sarnau (= fords), descriptive
of the way in which travel was achieved in this coastal area.
The present landscape of the Pwllheli basin or harbour and
the coastline east and west, is the product of an early nineteenth-century
Inclosure Act, by which the basin was embanked and the coastal
strips were drained.
The Medieval maerdref of the commote of Afloegion in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries was at Pwllheli. Before the conquest in 1283 a part
of the township gained borough status and, in the mid-sixteenth century,
was enfranchised and became a free borough. The borough lands were tightly
grouped between the Pool and the escarpment below Garn. Above this, it
is supposed, lay residual components of the manorial elements which include
the now demolished church of Deneio. Early maps and surviving buildings
allow us to identify the eighteenth and nineteenth-century core of the
town which almost certainly overlies the Medieval borough. The Rev Bingley,
in 1814, thought Pwllheli to be a very unpleasant town from the extreme
irregularity of the houses and streets. These features are, however,
are clues to its origins.
It is reasonable to assume that the triangle formed by the eastern part
of High Street, Whitehall Street (later Gaol Street and now Stryd Moch,
close to where the pig market stood) and Penlan Street. New Street, now
Lon Dywod, corresponds, more or less with the ancient shoreline and remained
undeveloped, except for access to the basin and shipbuilding, into the
nineteenth century. Buildings which lend character and historical depth
to this area of the town include: a group of two-storey, single window
rubble-built cottages on Strand Street of late eighteenth- early nineteenth-century
date; a three-storey Georgian house opposite the town hall on Penlan
Street and another three-storey house of about 1800, midway down Penlan
Street on the south side. There are three premises on the north side
of Penlan which were once the Eagles Hotel, of late seventeenth – or
early eighteenth-century date, with tall, stone, chimney stacks. Penlan
Fawr is a public house of the early seventeenth century with gable-end
chimney stacks and a barn at the rear of seventeenth-eighteenth-century
date. The walls of the public house were raised in the nineteenth century.
At the north-east end of the High Street, on the corner of the old Strand
Street there are three properties, fairly close to each other. On the
old Strand Street stands part of Madryn House, a late eighteenth-century
house which became an inn and then a bank. In the 1890s the frontage
was replaced with a classical façade. On the corner there is another
late eighteenth-century premises, three-storeyed with a red-brick stack.
Adjacent stands a former townhouse of the Madryn family. It then became
a public house, the Madryn Arms and, in the 1890s, the Post Office. King’s
Head Street is an extension of Strand Street, leading towards the escarpment
to the north. There is a group of five single-storey and attic cottages,
of rubble build with tall rubble stacks, in a row, on the south-west
side of the street, 50m from the corner with the High Street.
The best evidence for the identification and location of burgage plots
is to be found on John Wood’s 1834 plan. These are to be found
on the north and south side of the High Street at the junction with Gaol
Street, and on the north side of Penlan at its south-western end. The
dimensions correspond relatively closely to those of Beaumaris at about
80ft (24m) long and 40ft (12m) wide, bearing in mind that there will
have been several changes and modifications to these boundaries between
the thirteenth and the nineteenth century. John Wood has, perhaps, over-straightened
the back plots at the east end compared with a more sinuous interpretation
provided by the 1890s Ordnance Survey 1:2500 map. It would, nevertheless,
seem undeniable that the Medieval borough and later town of Pwllheli
was established on the sinuous arable quillets of open field cultivation.
Much of the landscape evidence for this transition has been lost with
development in the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A direct
parallel for the superimposition of a borough on pre-existing arable
fields and using their boundaries may be found at Rhosyr, Newborough,
on Anglesey.
Further aspects of the historic landscape
in this area relate to:
•The emergence of Pwllheli as ‘the
best town in this country’ and ‘the magazine
of goods which supplies it’ which enabled Pwllheli
to expand during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
•The maritime connection, historically
perceived in the ship-building industry which continued into
the late nineteenth century and has been superseded by pleasure
craft.
•The evidence of Parliamentary Inclosure
which enabled the Penrhos and Abererch wet lands to be drained
and the harbour embanked.
•The development of a tourist trade
and the provision of its facilities from the 1890s, particularly
seen in the West End development of Solomon Andrews.
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