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The transformation of the Ty yn y Llan to the Bull Inn
Ty yn y Llan Was a modest small holding rented by a Mr. Rowland I don’t know for how long but by 1770 the rent had increased to £13 3s.3 Indications of trouble began to appear in 1775, when Rowland was late paying his rent (now £13 7s). It was due at the end of December, but not paid until 20 May in the following year. 14 worse was to come. In 1778, Rowland failed to pay at all, and the rent due was carried over to the following year's account.15 From this point on, Rowland never completely cleared the debt, and though some payments were made in the next two years (1779-80)16 the arrears had accumulated to £20 5s. By 1781, when Rowland's tenancy ended.17 the implication must be that Rowland, now an old man, could no longer work his tenanted land, and was simply unable to pay. The Bulkeley estate seems to have recognised this, and apart from marking his entry in the rent book with an “N' (?Nonpayment) seems to have taken no action against him. As a long standing tenant, the estate appears to have regarded him as a kind of pensioner, though it received payment in full for the arrears in 1782, on the day before the next tenant took over. 18. Ty yn y Llan changed its character in the 1780s from a modest smallholding into a significant wayside inn. A Bulkeley estate document of 1793 refers to 'the Bull Inn otherwise Ty'n y Llan',26 but the transformation of Ty yn y Llan into the Bull (or Bull's Head) Inn took place some years before that. Lord Bulkeley leased Ty'n y Llan to James Sumpster on 23 October 1782.27 For a few years Sumpster seems to have been content with his tenancy, managing to find an increased rent (£15 by 1784)28 and taking on the lease of part of Bryn Meddyg field in 1785, which raised his rent to £21.29 Sumpster's evident entrepreneurship did not end with taking on more land (though he did take on more, in 1789 30). Sumpster seems to have conceived the notion of making use of Ty'n y Llan's position to build the first proper coaching inn between Penmaenmawr and Bangor. Accordingly, Lord Bulkeley agreed to lease the 'Bull's Head Inn' to James Sumpster in December 1788 for two lives, at an annual rent of £20 per annum.31
Aber had possessed ale houses for many years - the first surviving ale house licenses date from the mid-seventeenth century. Supplying drovers with ale was no doubt a significant business on top of local trade. But the creation of the turnpike in the 1770s brought an unprecedented flow of travelers through the village. It created new opportunities for business, and Ty'n y Llan's position beside the road made it an ideal property to develop in order to catch this trade. The lease of 1788 specified the alterations to be made at Ty'n y Llan in order to create the Bull's Head. Sumpster undertook to add 'one bay of good stone building’ to the house, 'which shall be made and finished into a handsome Parlor and Bar Room and convenient Chambers above with Garrets over them’. To complete the transformation of the house into an inn, Sumpster was to build 'a good stone stable and divide the same into Stalls for Gentlemen's Horses with a good Grainary or Loft over the same and also a good stone Coach House'. The extra 'bay' for the Parlour and Bar Room represents no doubt the twin rooms at the west end of the house to the right of the front door (though, as will be seen, there has been further work since then). The stable and coach house is presumably the outbuilding to the west of the house, whose two component elements are still visible over two hundred years later.
The rental of 1792 reveals that Sumpster was farming as well as inn keeping he still rented part of Bryn y Meddyg field along with the house, had a separate lease on five other fields or tenements, and was paying £25 per annum for the rent of Ty'n y Llan and Bryn Meddyg field.32 The fact that Sumpster's name was still recalled in the village over a century and a half later suggests that he was a very well-known figure in the community.33 He died in 1795.34
He was succeeded as tenant by Simon Reynolds. During Reynolds' tenancy the Bull's Head began to attract notices in literature written for travelers. At the end of the century the Napoleonic Wars closed the Continent to travel, so the gentry and aristocracy who might otherwise have made the Grand Tour turned their attention for the first time to picturesque parts of their own islands, such as the Lake District and Snowdonia. The Bull's Head or Bull Inn was well placed to attract the first tourists to the area. Several of the growing number of guide books from the late eighteenth century drew attention to Aber, its falls, its ancient monuments, and the spectacular views of the mountains to be seen from the Lavan Sands. Travelers who kept diaries sometimes mention Aber and its inn in their notes. W. Bingley in 1798 found it 'a comfortable little Inn' especially suited for energetic guests who wished to climb Penmaenmawr 'to examine the curious remains at the top'.35 Another visitor in the following year was unable to pass comment on the accommodation because when he arrived after a twenty-mile walk he found that 'the house was full and not a bed to be had'. He did, though, appreciate the landlord's food and - it would seem - brandy: 'However good spirits of our own and those of our Host, renovated my dying endeavors, and out we set off for Conway 9 miles further'.36 An anonymous writer taking a walking tour described it in 1802 as a good inn for the accommodation of such passengers who cross the sands at low water, to Beaumaris.'37
Reynolds maintained the same rent as Sumpster (£29 15s.). But like John Rowland twenty years previously, had difficulty in keeping up his rental payments. It is perhaps surprising, in view of the good notices the inn was beginning to receive, and of the fact that the inn was occasionally completely full, but in every year of his tenancy (1795-1801) Reynolds failed to pay on time, and in some years his payment was divided into two portions.38
In 1802, the Bull's Head received a new landlord: Edward Lewis, who remained there until his death at the age of 57 on April 25 1827. His wife, Jane, survived him by over thirty years.40 The Lewis’s arrived with big ideas. Not only did they accept a greatly increased rent (raised from £29 15s. to £42), but they immediately undertook to rent part of Glan y Mor for a further £8 and in the second year of their tenancy extended their interests to include the lease of other lands to the value of £25.41 There is some evidence of neglect during Reynolds' tenancy, in that a note in the margin of the 1802 Rental indicates that Edward Lewis was 'Allowed £31 10s. For repairs'. The inn and the Lewis’s themselves, made a good impression on visitors, to judge from the notices of the Bull's Head and its landlord in the travel literature of the time. Nicholson, in The Cambrian Traveler’s Guide in all Directions, was rather grudging, noting that the inn at Aber, though 'respectable', had no post horses to offer. But the antiquarian Fenton stayed at the Bull's Head in July 1810 and was clearly much taken with it: We leave Aber with much regret, being most pleasantly situated at the entrance into a charming and romantic little Valley, with a scattered village and Church prettily sprinkled with trees. The Inn is neat and clean, and the Landlord and his Wife are most civil and attentive. The View of the Sea from the window we sat in was most delightful, being a South East aspect, with Penmaenmawr raising its majestic Head exactly in front, and the other bold Capes projecting beyond it on one side, and Penmon and the Anglesey Coast with Priestholme Island on the other. If travelers are in quest of fine scenery, curious Relics of British Antiquity, and one [are?] fond of quiet neatness and civility, Aber will certainly gratify them to their utmost wishes.43
In the summer of 1823 a Northamptonshire gentleman who took a tour of north Wales, John Thornton of Brockhall, was less sanguine about the scenery: the journey from Bangor to Aber was 'rather dull', and there was so little water coming down Aber Falls that he judged them 'scarcely worth visiting’. The journey over Penmaenmawr, however compensated for this by giving him some of the excitement of a fairground ride, the pass being 'more terrific than any we had seen on the Holyhead Road', and after staying at the Bull's Head for a night Thornton agreed with the general judgment of other travelers. He commented in his journal that the inn at Aber was 'small, but neat and comfortable',44
It was not only travelers who appreciated the Lewis family and their Inn. In 1813 Lord Bulkeleys agent noted in a memorandum in the rental for that year. This tenant [Edward Lewis] appears to have contributed to the present value of the Property, and by his setting an Example to others, is deserving of every encouragement'. It is little wonder that the agent was pleased, when we realise that the Bull's Head Inn, which had commanded an annual rent of just £20 twenty years previously, was bringing in a rent for the Bulkeleys of £64 7s, in 1813. Lord Bulkeley signalled his pleasure by agreeing a rebate of £10 in the Lewis' rent.45 The Bulkeleys were willing to invest in the Bull's Head, and major repairs were carried out to the property, between November 1816 and November 1817, which totalled £150 12s. 7d.46 The Bulkeleys, or their agents, were willing to make capital available to these enterprising tenants. Several landlords of north Wales’s inns of this period were English people. This may have been true of Sumpster and Reynolds, to judge by their names. The Lewis’s though were both from Caernarvonshire according the 1841 census, and Jane in particular was from Penmynydd, Anglesey (1851 census). Where Reynolds had struggled to make the place pay, the Lewis’s seemed to have established a mutually-beneficial relationship with the Bulkeley estate. In their case, the industrious enterprise of local people and the commercial acumen of the big estate came together to create a successful business which thrived until brought down by an element beyond its control - the railway.
The fact that travelers consistently noted the cleanliness of the Bull's Head is itself significant. Perceptions of dirt 'are notoriously linked to cultural expectations,47 and English travelers into Wales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were crossing into a different culture. Some were aware of cultural differences and took the same perceptive attitude adopted by Dr Johnson when he encountered the domestic arrangements of Scottish Highlanders:
Of the houses little can be said ... With want of cleanliness it was ingratitude to reproach them. The servants having been bred upon the naked earth think every floor clean, and the quick succession of guests, perhaps not always over-elegant, does not allow much time for adjusting their apartments.48
However, many English visitors brought their prejudices with them, and passed unfavourable comments on the squalor which they perceived around them in Wales.49 The 'quiet neatness and civility' which they found at the Bull's Head suggests both the readiness of the landlord to conform to the expectations of visitors and his access to the means of meeting those expectations: in other words, capital to establish an English-style inn and income to maintain it. Edward Lewis was a farmer as well as an inn-keeper. The year before his death, Lewis was farming his own land, part of two other holdings (Glan y Mor and Ty'n y Gerddi) another complete holding (Cae Adda Ddu), and had cows and calves at tack elsewhere. His total rent of £93 made him the second highest-paying tenant after the tenant of Pen y Bryn.50 in the year of his death, his widow Jane took on a further tenancy (Madryn Lands), which brought the rent to £126, overtopping Pen y Bryn itself.51
The charming civility and prosperous industry of the landlord and his wife hid a sadder home life. At the time of Fenton's visit Edward and Jane Lewis had buried three children in the previous six years (Margaret 1804, Thomas 1806, Jane 1808). Two more children, William and Robert, died in 1817 and 1819 respectively. A further two died in young adulthood: Henry in 1827 (six months after his father) aged 23 and John in 1836 aged 24. Of their eleven children, only four survived into full adulthood: Susan, Llewelyn, Elizabeth and Edward. It is not surprising, but nonetheless revealing, that in the record of Edward Lewis senior's death in the parish register (1827), someone has written after his name the words 'diseased liver', words which another hand has (with a sense of decorum, but without obliterating the record) crossed out. The Bull's Head played a large part in the life of the local community. Auctions were held there.52 it was also until 1818 the venue for the annual parish Vestry Meeting. But in that year a group of parishioners, disgruntled by an irregular meeting in the previous year which had levied a high parish rate, raised an objection: We also abominate that shameful practise of holding Vestry’s at a Public House and of drinking Ale at such meetings at the Expense of the Parish and it is further unanimously Resolved that the same be discontinued and that the Overseers of the Parish be directed not to pay any more money for Ale at such meetings in future and that all Vestry’s in future be held at the Vestry Room in the Church being the legal place appointed to hold such meetings and that a Table be provided in the said room by the parish officers.53
Even during Edward Lewis's lifetime there was a degree of inconsistency about the name of Aber's inn: the 'Bull' and the 'Bull's Head' appear in the parish register apparently indiscriminately. After Edward's death his widow Jane became the licensee, and she seems to have decided on a change of name and a rebuilding. The Bulkeley accounts contain no details of this work beyond a note of £10 12s. 6d. paid to the workmen when the first stone of the 'Bulkeley Arms' was laid on 7 June 1830, and of £3 16s. Paid in ale to the workmen to celebrate the first visit of Sir R. B. Williams Bulkeley to the new building on 6 September 1830.54 we must suspect that a large part of the present building dates from this reconstruction of 1830. The new name appears to reflect the close interest which the Bulkeley family now took in this lucrative business on their estate. Old habits, though, died hard, and as late as 1851 the census enumerator was still calling it The Bull Inn'.
One illustrious visitor to the Bulkeley Arms was the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. In July 1827 she came to Aber on a family holiday and 'spent a very happy month with 17 aunts, cousins and such like'.55 She was then seventeen. Aber made such an impression on her that she returned on her honeymoon (1832), spending a fortnight there in August and September. On 17 September 1832 Mrs. Gaskell wrote to her sister: We enjoyed our stay at dear little Aber very much indeed - and were not a little loath to leave it last Monday.56 Though neither of the letters describing her stay in Aber explicitly mentions the Bull's Head Inn or Bulkeley Arms, and it is possible that the family group in 1827 took a house, it is almost certain that she and William Gaskell would have stayed at the Bulkeley Arms in 1832. On both occasions she would have found Mrs. Lewis in sole charge, as her earlier visit took place three months after Edward Lewis' death. It is intriguing to wonder how much of the character of Mrs. Lewis found its way into the portrayal of Mrs. Morgan, the kindly and bustling landlady of the inn in the Snowdonia village of'Llan-dhu', in Mrs. Gaskell's 1853 novel Ruth. The Bulkeley Arms in its heyday was a busy establishment. It retained its dual role as both an inn and a farm, as it apparently had done since the time that James Sumpster created the Bull's Head Inn in the 1780s. In the 1841 census, Jane Lewis is recorded as the Innkeeper, and her son Llewelyn as 'Farmer'. The 1847 Tithe Award specifies that he was farming 187 acres as Lord Bulkeley’s tenant. Living in the house in 1841 were four members of the Lewis family: Jane and Llewelyn together with the younger children, Elizabeth and Edward. In the house were three female servants, presumably to attend to the house itself and the inn business, and one male farm labourer. An outhouse contained five farm labourers, all in their teens or early twenties. Another outhouse, which must have been the stable, housed two horse keepers, who seem to have been a father and son team: Jacob and Thomas Roberts. The Bulkeley Arms therefore was home to a total of fifteen people in 1841. Its business as an inn brought guests to the house also, and on census night in 1841 there were four guests: two Customs officers, a young merchant's clerk of only fifteen years of age, and a man whose occupation is described as 'independent', perhaps a gentleman on holiday.
The heyday of the Bulkeley Arms did not last long. As early as 1822 a direct steamship service began between Liverpool and Dublin, which attracted travelers away from Holyhead. The number of passengers from Holyhead reached its maximum in 1825 and halved from that peak in just six years.57 Even more threatening to trade on the road was the railway. The Chester to Holyhead line was completed as far as Bangor in 1848, and immediately made the turnpike redundant for travellers who wished to cover any distance. The impact of the railway on the Bulkeley Arms is apparent in the 1851 Census return. Three members of the family were resident: Elizabeth and Edward had left home, but Llewelyn's older sister Susan, who was not married, had returned, perhaps to help care for their mother who was now seventy-seven. There were, however, no guests at the inn, and even more significantly, no staff to deal with resident guests. The only indoor servants were a waitress and a cook. The rest of the establishment were all concerned with agricultural work: an ostler, a dairymaid, a gardener, a carter, and three ploughmen.
The Bulkeley Arms continued to receive good notices in guide books. M. L. Lewis as late as 1854 complimented the 'pretty inn' kept by Mrs Lewis.58 J. Hicklin's Excursions into North Wales (1856) described it as 'an excellent inn, where post-chaises and cars may, be had'.59 However, by this time, the great days of road travel were over, and inns such as the Bulkeley Arms, which had been built to service the passing trade, had had their day. In 1841 the Bulkeley Arms housed, in three separate buildings, fifteen permanent residents and, on census night, a further four guests. Ten years later, the residents were down to twelve, apparently all living in the house itself The work of the household was shifting more towards the farm, with only Anne Hughes the waitress seemingly employed specifically for the work of the inn. It would soon change yet more
At the time of Jane Lewis' death in 1858 the house was still the Bulkeley Arms. By the time of the 1871 census it had reverted to the name of the eighteenth-century smallholding whose site it occupied: 'Tan y Fynwent' (Under the Cemetery'). Unfortunately, the census enumerator's notebook for the 1861 census is missing for this portion of Aber parish, which makes it more difficult to fix the date at which the name changed, and to understand more clearly what was happening to the house.
Llewelyn Lewis seems to have taken over the house on his mother's death. Since 1841 Llewelyn had been described in the census as a farmer, and we may suppose that the death of his mother, who had been associated with the inn for over half a century, enabled Llewelyn to abandon the ailing licensed trade in order to concentrate on the farm. The name The Bulkeley Arms' did not disappear, as it was appropriated by the hotel which opened by the railway station, the new way for visitors to approach the splendours of Aber. The baptism of a child from a family called Edwards at the Bulkeley Arms in 1865 shows that the new hotel had taken over the name by that date. The death of Jane Lewis seems to have freed Llewelyn in other ways too: by 1871 he was married, to Jane, a native of Conwy five years his junior, and was the father of Maria, who had been born in 1866, and who appears to have been their only child. These were the years of ‘high farming', when agricultural incomes were on the rise. Llewelyn Lewis rose with them: by 1871 he was farming 600 acres — three times the size of the farm 20 years previously - and was employing 11 men. The house appears to have been extended at the east end during the late nineteenth century, and the most likely Period is this time of Llewelyn’s prosperity. The men whom Llewelyn employed do not seem to have lived in Tan y Fynwent and its outhouses, as their predecessors had done in 1841. The only servants recorded in the house itself in 1871 were three female domestics: Mary Hughes the cook, Ellin Lewis the housemaid, and Maria's nurse, Margaret Williams. Llewellyn’s wife Jane died at the close of 1878 (she was buried on 2 January 1879). Some time between then and 1881 Llewelyn and his daughter Maria had gone, to be succeeded by a family named Roberts, who came to Aber from Llanddeiniolen. The Roberts family continued farming at Tan y Fynwent, though on a smaller scale. However, with the departure of Llewelyn Lewis the last personal and human link with the days of the Bull's Head Inn was severed. The substantial structure of present-day Llysonnen remains as the physical reminder of a house where three generations of enterprise and diligence helped lay the foundations of the growing industry of 'tourism'.
That was my Edits of an article by WILLIAM STRANGE for Caernarvonshire Historical Society
NOTES
14 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No. 4794: Rental 1775.
15 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No. 4797: Rental 1778.
16 UWB Baron Hill MSS, Nos. 4798, 4800: Rentals 1779,1780.
17 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No. 4803: Rental 1781.
18 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No. 4803: Rental 1781.
26 National Library of Wales, Llanfair & Brynodol Deeds & Docs, D485. The identification is also made in UWB Baron Hill MSS 4827 (Rental, 1802).
27 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No.4803: Rental 1781.
28 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No.4806: Rental 1784.
29 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No.4808: Rental 1785.
30 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No.4812: Rental 1789.
31 UWB, Baron Hill MSS, No.4593: Counterpart of lease.
32 National Library of Wales, Llanfair & Brynodol Deeds & Docs, R142.
33 Owen, 'Records of the Parish', p.79.
34 Aber parish register: burial 1 June 1795.
35 W. Bingley, A Tour round North Wales performed in the summer of 1798, London, 1800,1, p. 130
36 NLW MS 12651B: Robert Ker Porter, Diary of a journey to North Wales,1799.
37 Anon., Circular Tour from Chester through North Wales, London, 1802,p.136.
38 UWB Baron Hill MSS, Nos. 4818, 4819, 4822, 4823, 4824 (1799, oddly, 3d short), 4825 (1800, only slightly late), 4826..
40 She was buried on 13 July 1858 at the age of 83.
41 UWB Baron Hill MSS No.4828 (Rental, 1803).
42 Nicholson, The Cambrian Traveller's Guide in all Directions, London, 2nd ed 1813, col. 1.
43 R. Fenton, Tours in Wales (1804-1813), London, 1917, pp. 207-8.
44 Northamptonshire Record Office, Thornton (Brockhall) Collection, Th3186,p.17.
45 University, of Wales Bangor, Baron Hill MSS, 4966. In fact this was £10 from the total rent of £110, which included lands as well.
46 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No. 4981: Account of expenditure, 1816-18.
47 As explored in, for instance, Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger, London, 1966, pp. 29-40.
48 S. Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, Oxford, 1924, p.91 [first pub. 17751].
49 Peter Howell Williams, Travellers to Llanrwst and its vicinity 1750-1821, including T. B. Macaulay as a Reluctant Student', Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 64 (2003), pp.33-9
50 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No.7430: Rental 1826.
51 UWB Baron Hill MSS, No.7430: Rental 1827.
52 UWB Welsh Collection: Particular of an auction at the Bull's Head Inn, Aber, llth May 1830.
53 Owen, 'Records of the Parish of Aber', pp. 79-80.
54 UWB Baron Hill MSS, 7430: Rental 1830.
55 J. A. V. Chappie and A. Pollard (ed.), The Letters of Mrs Gaskell, Manchester, 1997, p. 16 (Letter 9: 1838).
56 W. Gerin, Elizabeth Gaskell: A Biography, Oxford, 1980, p.49.
57 Jones, "The George', p. 116.
58 M. L. Lewis, Gleanings in North Wales, with Historical Sketches, Liverpool, 7th ed 1854.
59 J. Hicklin, Excursions into North Wales, London, 1856.
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