This house (sometimes known as The Falls) was the country residence of the de la Pastures from around 190o. Llandogo is a small village in Monmouthshire, Wales, about halfway between Monmouth and Chepstow in the Wye Valley. The village overlooks the Wye to the Forest of Dean beyond; the Priory is at the top of the hill. Here’s the view from The Priory in the 1950s (copyright Clint Mann, used under the Creative Commons 2.0 licence.):
The house dates from 1838 and was designed by the firm of architects Wyatt and Brandon. Photographs from the 1950s show a substantial stone-faced house with gables, tall chimneys, an arched front door, oriel and bay windows, and an elegant terrace at the back of the house.
Before the de la Pastures, it had been home to Antonio and Anna Gallenga. Antonio was an Italian politician who served in Napoleon’s army and was for many years a war correspondent for The Times. Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts, visited the house as a child; his mother travelled by train, but he and his brothers made the journey by boat from London via the Thames and Avon before rowing up the Wye (Scouting for Boys, 3rd ed 1910, p59).
What made the de la Pastures move to this part of Wales? I suspect that Henry de la Pasture was following his older brother Gerard, who had moved his family from Somerset to Cefn Ila, near Usk. They might also have known the area, since they certainly spent part of their childhood in Herefordshire and Gloucestershire, on the other side of the Wye. It was also a bigger, grander house than East Butterleigh, with extensive grounds including the waterfalls which give the house its alternative name. Perhaps it was also slightly less remote, with a railway halt in the village, allowing them easier access to London. It also seems that there was a more developed Catholic population in Monmouthshire; local Catholic gentry families meant that the area saw greater religious tolerance during the seventeenth century. This would have been important to both de la Pasture brothers and their families.
In the 1901 census, all the de la Pastures plus the girls’ cousin Dorothy (or Dorothea) Charrington are in residence, as well as two governesses — one French, one English — and three servants. Henry de la Pasture would die at Llandogo in 1908, and Betty inherited the house from him.
The most detailed reference to this house in EMD’s novels is in her penultimate book, No One Now Will Know (Macmillan, 1941). In the Victorian-set part of the novel, there is an extensive description of The Grove, clearly based on The Priory:
The Grove […] was a large, stone-built gabled house typical of South Wales, extravagantly draped in creepers, jasmine, wistaria, clematis and ivy. Enormous rhododendrons bordered the drive, which lay between a larch plantation on one side and a high bank on the other, covered with flowering shrubs and tall, drooping laburnums. The house stood well above the Valley, in which lay a tiny hamlet and through which the river Wye wound its rapid silver course. Every night swirls and wreaths of white mist rose up from the terrace and across the windows of The Grove. The gardens were carefully and elaborately laid out, with ribbon borders and patty-pans of brilliant flowers. A small fountain played into a stone basin at the end of the terrace, at the other was a clustering group of silver birches, and a weeping ash that overhung the flight of stone steps that led down into the park. Everything grew with lush abundance in the mild, wet climate […] When the incessant, pouring rain of the autumn and winter set in, […] the wayside waterfalls were swelled into leaping, brown torrents flecked with cream. (pp190-191)
EMD left this house at least thirty years before writing this account but the detail and texture of her surroundings were imprinted on her memory. Her mother’s novel Michael Ferrys (1913) also used the setting of The Priory for the home of the Gryffydd family, keeping the banks of rhododendrons on the drive and the fountain and waterfalls, but replacing the house with an altogether grander decaying castle. The Priory was substantial enough, however, and if only parts of EMD’s description of the house and grounds are accurate, it must have been expensive to buy and run. Henry de la Pasture left a very small amount of cash to his widow, so it seems likely either that her literary career funded the extensive gardening work and the five servants, or that the de la Pastures were living somewhat beyond their means. For at least some of their time there, the family lived in a smaller property nearby, The Cloisters, suggesting they had let the bigger house out to reduce their expenses or increase their income.
After Betty’s second marriage to Hugh Clifford in 1910, the property was let to Arthur Burchardt-Ashton, who had rented the house from them for short periods in the past. A friend of Baden-Powell, he used the house as a holiday home for underprivileged boys, among other charitable activities. Betty finally sold the house in 1921. Since then it has been a walkers’ hostel, a private home, a holiday centre for schoolchildren again, and is now a residential care home with a very useful web page about the history of the house.
Cover photograph of Llandogo from the hill above The Priory copyright Peter Randall-Cook, used under the Creative Commons 2.0 licence.