Benjamin Hammet had founded a London bank, sat as Member of Parliament for Taunton, and decided in the late 18th century that what he really wanted was a Welsh tinplate works. He bought the estate at Castell Malgwyn on the south bank of the River Teifi, in part to control the tinplate works at Penygored a short distance upstream. Almost immediately he closed the public road between Llechryd and Cilgerran that ran through his new land. He rerouted it south, and to make it work he built two bridges that still stand: Castell Malgwyn Bridge over the leat that fed his tinworks, and Hammet Bridge over the Morgenau brook.
Sir Benjamin Hammet was born in Taunton, made his money in London — co-founding the bank of Esdaile, Hammet and Co — and was returned as MP for his home town in 1782. The Georgian country house at Castell Malgwyn is a textbook example of how 18th-century English wealth landed in rural Wales: a banker buys an industrial concern, builds a fashionable Georgian villa to overlook it, and reshapes the local geography to suit his needs. The Llechryd-to-Cilgerran road that had served farmers and travellers for generations simply ceased to exist where it crossed his land. Hammet's compensation was the bridges, which were technically improvements; the locals' compensation was a longer journey.
Sir Benjamin died in 1800, and the calculus of the estate began to unwind. His son John inherited but only briefly; he was dead by 1811. By 1806 the tinplate works at Penygored had been demolished. By 1811 the contents of the house were being sold. Sir Benjamin's widow, Lady Louisa, lived on at Castell Malgwyn until her own death in 1824. With no Hammet heirs in residence, the property went to Abel Anthony Gower of Glandovan, who let it out — the standard fate of an inherited country house with no industrial income to support it. The tin trade had moved south to the Llanelli and Swansea valleys, where coal was cheap and labour plentiful. Castell Malgwyn's industrial moment was over.
Abel Anthony Gower died in 1837, and his nephew Abel Lewes Gower inherited and moved in. Unlike his uncle, the younger Gower wanted to live in the house and to make something of it. He spent significantly on improvements, and commissioned the architect Ambrose Poynter — son of an academician and a designer of churches and Gothic civic buildings — to add a lodge, a grand entrance and a stable court to the estate. Poynter's work survives in the listed buildings of the property today. Then in 1849 Abel Lewes also died young, leaving his widow as resident chatelaine. She held on until 1886, by which time the estate had been hers for thirty-seven years.
When the widow died, the estate passed to Abel Lewes's brother, Robert Frederick Gower, who had already inherited Glandovan from their father. The Gower family kept Castell Malgwyn for another sixty-two years, through two world wars and the slow collapse of the country-house economy. They sold in 1948, in the years when so many great houses of Wales were being demolished or converted, and Castell Malgwyn became a hotel in 1962. Today it operates as Hammet House, an upmarket bed and breakfast — the banker's name finally back over the door, after the Gowers had it for nearly twice as long.
The house is Grade II listed; the gardens are Grade II* on the Cadw and ICOMOS Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales. The grounds slope down to the south bank of the Teifi, with formal lawns, mature trees, and lines of sight engineered to make a Welsh river look like an English landscape painting. Across the water, the village of Llechryd sits where the old road used to end before Hammet closed it. Visitors to the house today drive in over Hammet's diverted line. The bridges he built still carry traffic. Even the leat that fed his vanished tinworks can be traced in the contour of the lawn. A great deal of what a man does in his lifetime evaporates, but earthworks endure.
Castell Malgwyn sits at 52.06 degrees north, 4.61 degrees west, on the south bank of the River Teifi about 6 km upstream of Cardigan and directly opposite the village of Llechryd. From the air the estate appears as a wedge of mature woodland and formal lawns running down to the river, with the cream-coloured Georgian house visible at the eastern end. The Teifi makes a distinctive bend at Llechryd just downstream of the property. Best viewed at 1,500-2,500 feet AGL on an east-west pass following the river valley. Nearest airfield is Haverfordwest (EGFE), about 14 nm south. Surrounding country is rolling pasture and wooded ridges; the Preseli Hills rise to the south-west.