The manor once stood in a thousand acres of ground. Inside there are fireplaces believed to have been brought from Tredegar House by Mary Morgan and a post and panel partition which holds graffiti by Charles Griffiths.
The house remained in the Griffiths family until 1886 when its final owner Florence Griffiths died a spinster. It then passed to the Laybourne family. It was bought as a wedding present by Richard Laybourne for his daughter Edith on her marriage to Alfred Pilliner. They didn't live there though, the house was run down and in need of repair, so they built a new home, Llanyrafon House. It was around this time the original staircase was removed from the manor and placed in this new house which was on the site of the future Commodore Hotel.
The manor remained in use though, it was divided up by Alfred Pilliner and became a farm. The east and west wings became cottages while the north wing was converted into quarters for unmarried workers.
From a map produced in the 1920's, we get a glimpse of what a busy and lively place the manor must have been. There was a kitchen garden, a carpenters workshop, stalls for geese, a pigsty, sheds for wagons, a hay barn, stables for horses and extensive orchards. Behind the large barn a waterwheel powered an elevator to stack the hay and there was also a grind stone to crush apples to be made into cider.
Alfred Pilliner died in 1932 but the house stayed with the family through wartime when land girls were brought in to boost the workforce. During the 1950;s though with the birth of Cwmbran New Town the manor was sold to Cwmbran Development Corporation and later to Torfaen Museum Trust.
Llanyrafon Manor stood abandoned and decaying for many years but is now open to the public. Re-enactments have taken place and visitors can get a real feel of what life would have been like in past times. It is also a pretty active place for ghosts too. Staff have opened up in the mornings to find water thrown across the floor in the café. Mediums have visited the building and reported an old lady placing herbs in the chimney of a fireplace. In the buttery knocks have been heard in answer to questions and in the office a voice was heard to say 'no' when staff asked if they could open the door. The ghosts are said to be children running around in the attic. Outside in the barn footsteps have been heard crunching on the gravel when no one is around. There are tales of a monk that wanders the grounds and a human like shadow has also been seen as well as a spectral cat.
As a volunteer guide I also witnessed some spooky goings on myself. On my first day at the manor and before knowing anything of its past, I kept being drawn to the second floor window above the porch as if someone was watching me. I later found out that a little boy used to stand watching and waiting for his mother to return home but she never did. He is often felt to hold the hand of visitors in his room. Another time when I was in the manor alone I heard footsteps coming down the stairs but there was no one there and on some occasions visitors would simply refuse to enter the house.
Alfred Massey Pilliner was the uncle of my grand-father, Ronald Benjamin Colerick Pilliner.
ReplyDelete