It was once home to Britain’s first black sheriff, and a destination on the 18th-century tourist trail that held a place in the public imagination alongside the Lake District.
Piercefield House and its views of the Wye Valley inspired William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was also a monument to the riches of Britain’s slave traders and their investors.
There is also a “powerful resonance”, according to architect and historian Dr Victoria Perry, between Piercefield Park and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park whose fictional patron, Thomas Bertram, is described in the novel as being the owner of several Antiguan sugar estates.
Yet the neoclassical mansion, a Grade II*-listed building designed by Sir John Soane, is now on the verge of collapse, according to a structural engineer who has been monitoring Piercefield for more than a decade.
“There used to be a recognisable, structurally viable house, with two pavilions connected by corridors,” said Sinclair Johnston, a conservation and structural engineer and chairman of the Forest of Dean Buildings Preservation Trust.
“But over the years the vegetation has been allowed to grow up, and what kills buildings like this is that shrubs grow up between the stones and burst them apart. Now the two pavilions are almost completely overgrown and the house has lost an enormous amount of stone.”
The ruins of Piercefield House were once part of a large 300-acre estate, which in 1925 was bought by a group who created Chepstow racecourse in the grounds. In 2007, the company that owned the racecourse and estate, Northern Racing, was bought by David and Simon Reuben, the billionaire property magnates. Piercefield House was later separated from the estate and is now owned by Mondello Investments Limited, a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, but campaigners believe the house remains under the control of the Reuben brothers. In 2013, Save Britain’s Heritage launched a campaign to rescue the house, but so far the Reuben brothers have not responded.
Johnston, whose 50-year career has included advising the Crown Estate and the Church Commissioners, has not seen any work take place to restore the building on his regular visits to Piercefield. He said it would be possible to save the building with enough money and would involve some reconstruction.
“Buildings like this work like a box,” he said. “Once one side comes off, they’ve really lost it. It’s got to the state where it is seriously distressed.”
Piercefield has not been kind to its owners. It was bought in 1740 by Valentine Morris, an Antigua plantation owner, who developed the park and its grounds at a time when Georgian high society was developing an interest in tourism.
William Gilpin’s writings about the Wye Valley prompted the Wye Tour – an alternative to the Grand Tour, particularly during the Napoleonic wars of the early 19th century. But Morris went bankrupt and sold Piercefield to a banker, George Smith, who commissioned Soane – one of Britain’s most famous architects and designer of the Bank of England – to redevelop the mansion in 1785. Smith also went bankrupt and sold Piercefield to Nathaniel Wells in 1802, a wealthy 23-year-old who had inherited his father William’s three sugar plantations in St Kitts.
William Wells had sent his son to school in England and, in his will, freed the boy’s mother, Juggy, an enslaved housemaid who took the name Joardine on her manumission. The young man spent £90,000 of his £120,000 fortune on Piercefield and lived there with his wife and sister – a visitor to the house in 1803 described him as “a Creole of very deep colour, but Miss Wells [his sister] is fair”. Wells became an important local dignitary, appointed as sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1818 and later commissioned as a lieutenant in the Yeomanry Cavalry of Gloucestershire and Monmouth.
He kept the plantations though, and as a slave-owner received £1,400 in compensation in 1837 when slavery was banned in the colonies. Dr Victoria Perry, a historian and architect whose 2022 book A Bittersweet Heritage explored how the slave trade and Caribbean plantations fed the wealth of elites in Georgian Britain, spoke last week about Piercefield at a talk hosted by Save Britain’s Heritage.
“Visitors … would go to Piercefield to experience the dramatic views of the river Wye, from the rolling parkland and cliffside walks [then] visitors would stay the night at local inns, travel to see the nearby Ironworks and the ruins of Tintern Abbey,” she said. “But the constructions, walks and park and follies at Piercefield, even the roads that allowed tourists to visit had been funded by the profits of Antiguan sugar plantations, which obviously at that time used slavery.”
She added: “In the USA, over the last few years, some institutions and families have begun to acknowledge their links to plantation slavery. I’d love to get together a collection of individuals and institutions to transform Piercefield and its grounds to sort of reunite them and create a centre of learning and understanding.”
Henrietta Billings, director of Save Britain’s Heritage, told the meeting that they had not given up trying to engage with the owners to find a way to save Piercefield.
The building has not been used since 1929 but was given listed status as a ruin in 2001. The fact the house is owned by a company offshore makes it much harder for Monmouthshire County Council to do anything to force the owners to act. The local authority could theoretically issue a repairs order, obliging the owners to take action. It could even carry out the work itself and charge it back to the owners – but doing so would be expensive and with no guarantee that the legal owner has any assets other than Piercefield House.
Neither Chepstow racecourse nor the Reuben Foundation responded to request for comment.
