‘A noble mansion'

Margam Park, Neath Port Talbot, part II A country park managed by Neath Port Talbot Council In the second of two articles, David Robinson looks at the development of Margam from the late 18th century, with the building of a magnificent orangery and the creation of an outstanding Picturesque house in the 1830s

A DECADE after his ennoblement in 1711, Thomas, the 1st Baron Mansel of Margam, invited Francis Smith of Warwick to remodel his seat at Margam in a manner that befitted his new-found nobility. Smith pleaded ill health and the great rambling house described last week—a medieval monastery remodelled in the 16th and 17th centuries—remained intact. Thomas died two years later, in 1723, and the male line of the Mansel family came to an end in 1750. Its patrimony consequently passed to the family of Mary Mansel (d. 1735), who had married John Ivory Talbot (d. 1772) of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. The descendants of this match would transform the property.

Their grandson, Thomas Mansel Talbot (1747−1813), marked his majority in 1768 with a Grand Tour. The young man was clearly enthralled with Italy and with Rome in particular, ‘this Queen of Cities’ as he called it. There, in the early 1770s, he spent almost £7,500 acquiring a collection of antique sculpture, works of art, prints, books, furniture, and models of ancient buildings, all of which were shipped to Wales from Livorno on the Tuscany coast.

Unlike his Mansel forebears, Talbot was never greatly interested in public life. He took no active role in politics, nor courted county or national society. As a consequence, almost all that we know of him is derived from family documents, with much set out by one of his direct descendants, Joanna Martin, in The Penrice Letters (1993).