Sources: Helena Gerrish, CADW
Images 2-4,6,9-15 © Country Life Picture Library
Image 1 © Mathern Palace Archives
Image 5 © David Ottewill
Image 7 © RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collections
Image 8 © Cyril Hoare
Image 16 © Helena Gerrish
In the mid 7thC Meurig, King of Gwent, granted the lands around Mathern to the Bishopric of Llandaff in memory of his father, Tewdrig, who had died there after having been wounded in battle with the Saxons near Tintern. As well as the church of St Tewdric's, an episcopal residence was built. The palace grew in grandeur over the centuries as it remained one of the three, and latterly the only, residence of the bishops for more than a thousand years. However, the last bishop to live there died in 1705 and in the late 18thC it was partially demolished, with the land and remaining buildings being let out for farming
In 1894 the archiect and garden designer H Avray Tipping (later the archictecture editor of Counry Life) bought the much-reduced property. By the turn of the century he had renovated and enlarged what remained of the house
(this and most of the other photographs shown here first appeared in a feature in Country Life in 1910)
Tipping, seen here in the loggia in 1910, had been influenced by the garden designs of, among others, Gertrude Jekyll and laid out the gardens at Mathern in the style of the Arts & Crafts movement
A wider view of the paved garden and loggia (1910)
H Avray Tipping (c1914)
The west side in 1910, with a Banksian rose that grew
thirty feet in two years
The entrance to Mathern Palace
(pencil sketch by GH Kitchin, 1909)
Tipping at Mathern in 1904, with Lady Celia Congreve.
A lifelong friend, she would later be awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery whilst serving as a nurse on the Western Front, and later still would write the enduringly popular "Firewood Poem"
Tipping sold Mathern Palace in 1914. Subsequently it housed Belgian refugees during the First World War and in the 1950s was purchased by the owners of Llanwern steelworks, for use as a corporate guest house
(1910)
Looking west towards the garden shed (1910)
Looking east from the garden shed (1910)
Tipping canalised surviving medieval fishponds to create a stream as part of a water garden (1910)
The conservatory (1910)
The yew arbour (1910)
The east front in 1910
Mathern Palace in 2010 when owned by the Corus Group,
a subsidiary of Tata Steel.
In 2014 it once more became a private home