Qualla: Talhenbont Hall

Talhenbont Hall: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Eric Jones, CC BY-SA 2.0. The stone tablet over the south-west doorway carries the initials WV and the date 1607. WV is William Vaughan of Corsygedol, the man who built the house, and 1607 is the year he completed it -- forty-one years before the king he would later support went to the block in Whitehall. The hall was originally called Plas Hen, the old place, a name that perhaps acknowledged that the Vaughans had been here a long time before they built in stone. The first record of the family in Eifionydd dates from around 1416. They claimed descent from Collwyn ap Tagno, the eleventh-century lord whose lineage formed the fifth of the legendary Fifteen Tribes of Wales. By the time William Vaughan put up the present house, the Vaughan estate was part of the largest landholding in North Wales.

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Image: Eric Jones | CC BY-SA 2.0

Talhenbont Hall: The Civil War in the Hall

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William M. Connolley, CC BY 3.0. Within forty years of being built, Plas Hen found itself caught between the two sides of the English Civil War. Parliament's New Model Army seized the mansion at one point in the campaign. The Royalists under Sir John Owen of Clenennau -- the Welsh general who held North Wales fo...

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Image: William M. Connolley | CC BY 3.0

Talhenbont Hall: From Vaughan to Mostyn to Ellis-Nanney

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RCAHMW, Public domain. The last Vaughan generation began with William Vaughan, born 1707, who attended Cambridge and served as MP for Merioneth from 1734 through six parliaments until 1768. He married Catherine Nanney, heiress of the Nannau estate, in 1733. They had one daughter, Anne, who died young a...

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Image: RCAHMW | Public domain

Talhenbont Hall: Stone, Slate and a Tudor Arch

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data, CC BY-SA 3.0. The house that William Vaughan built in 1607 was originally T-shaped. Subsequent owners altered it to a W cross-wing plan, adding a gabled porch on the north-east leading to the parlour and a service wing in the nineteenth century. The exterior is two storeys plus an attic, the w...

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Image: Nilfanion, created using Ordnance Survey data | CC BY-SA 3.0

Talhenbont Hall: Weddings and Wallpaper

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RCAHMW, Public domain. Talhenbont Hall is now run as a wedding venue, with the outbuildings converted into self-catering holiday cottages. The old farm workers who lived in those cottages until the 1980s would barely recognise the place; the pigsty is gone, the stable with its round-headed doorway is n...

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Image: RCAHMW | Public domain