Walking through a glade on the Cilwendeg estate, in Pembrokeshire, one suddenly encounters the prettiest of buildings: one would not be at all surprised if Hansel and Gretel skipped around the corner. The monochrome exterior, with stepped parapet, conceals a vibrant interior with walls and ceiling decorated with shells and minerals, brightly coloured glass in the windows and a floor inlaid with animal bones and teeth. By the end of the twentieth century this curiosity was neglected and the ceiling had collapsed, but an exemplary restoration means that the building is once more an absolute delight.
Credit for the survival of the Shell House goes to the Temple Trust. In the early 2000s, Suzannah Fleming, Chair of the Temple Trust and fresh from masterminding the restoration of Garrick’s Temple on the Thames, spotted the Shell House on a list of endangered buildings. The owner, local farmer Alan Bowen, was keen to see the building restored, and agreed to sell the building to the Temple Trust, enabling the charity to apply for grant funding.
But to travel back in time a couple of centuries, the Shell House was one of a number of landscape ornaments built by Morgan Jones the younger (1787-1840) on the estate he inherited from his uncle, Morgan Jones senior (1740-1826). Jones senior was the owner of the Skerries lighthouse off Anglesey. Every ship that used the busy shipping route, including all vessels heading for Liverpool, then one of the busiest ports in the world, had to pay a toll. Thanks to this incredibly profitable enterprise, Jones junior was able to live a life of leisure as a country squire.
Little is known of the early history of what we now know as the Shell House, and even its original name is not recorded: it is shown on the 1849 tithe map, and on the later Ordnance Survey maps, but it is not named. Nineteenth-century topographical works praise the beauties of the mansion and the demesne, but fail to mention the ornamental buildings. The first mention of the Shell House found to date is in the particulars when the estate was offered for sale in 1906, where it is noted as a ‘Quaint Grotto and Rookery’. It is thought to have been built by Jones junior in the 1820s, but the designer and the hand(s) behind the shell decoration remains a mystery. Shell houses are generally the work of the ladies of the house but Jones was a bachelor, with no wife or daughters, so perhaps he himself rolled up his fine linen sleeves and got to work. Or could his sisters have been the shell artists? Little is known about Margaret, but Jane Martha Jones (c.1780-1864) was clearly a capable woman, and she ran the estate from the time of her brother’s death in 1840 until she herself died in 1864 aged 85.
The plight of the garden ornament was highlighted in the Save Britain’s Heritage report of 1987, Pavilions in Peril. The author, Julia Abel Smith, wrote that ‘mercifully, this little charmer has escaped vandalism but suffers from neglect’. By the time the Temple Trust purchased it in 2003 the interior was in a sorry state, but enough of the shell decoration survived for an informed restoration to take place. The Temple Trust raised £156,000, from a variety of sources to enable work to begin.
Local conservation architect Roger Clive-Powell (1944-2015) was commissioned to oversee the restoration, and shell artist Blott Kerr-Wilson to recreate the interior. Cambria Archaeology conducted an exhaustive study of the building and excavated the area around it to salvage the remnants scattered around. They found that unlike many a Shell House, embellished with exotic specimens brought back from distant shores, the Cilwendeg garden house was decorated almost exclusively with shells from nearby Pembrokeshire beaches: mussels, cockles, oysters, razors, whelks, limpets and otters.
Blott scoured local beaches for replacement shells, aided by her apprentice, who was none other than the multi-tasking Suzannah Fleming. When replacements for the few non-indigenous shells that had once decorated the walls were needed, an appeal was made. Local residents quickly found the required pink conch shells in their family collections (many were descendants of merchant seamen) and donated them to this wonderful project. Blott remembers that finding the sheep knuckle bones and horses’ teeth to restore the floor was a less pleasant process, best glossed over.
The roof had collapsed, and this was the one area where the decorative scheme had been completely lost. Suzannah, Roger and Blott worked together to design a new pattern for the reinstated ceiling.
And there are some delightful finishing touches…
The two windows were restored with new stained glass based on fragments found on site, and even on the dullest of winter days the light streams through. The restoration was completed in 2006 and was awarded the Georgian Group’s prestigious Award for the Restoration of a Georgian Garden Building a year later. Few shell houses of this complexity survive and of those that do, for obvious reasons, there is little or no public access. The Temple Trust should be lauded for not just saving this rare example, but for its commitment to welcoming visitors to this exquisite little building.
Twenty years on there are new challenges, and a corrugated iron cover, supported by scaffolding, is currently keeping the building dry in preparation for remedial work to damp proof the front and rear gables. Planning permission has been granted and a fundraising campaign is about to be launched, so if you are able to help in any way click here to find out more.
The Shell House awaiting work to prevent water ingress. The wooden porch was long-gone but has been recreated based on the evidence discovered during the survey of the building. The Flâneuse visited on a murky February morning, so here is Suzannah’s cheerful photo taken on a brighter day:
The Shell House can be seen between 1st March and the end of December, but visits must be pre-booked. Further information can be found on the Temple Trust’s website. The mansion and further picturesque estate buildings are strictly private.
Huge thanks to Suzannah for her help with this post. Thank you for reading and, as ever, you can share your thoughts via the comments box at the foot of the page.
