Bryngwyn

Bryngwyn is a house, now divided into flats and engineering workshops, built in 1868 with later alterations and additions. It was designed by Frederick Kempson for Sir James Rankin, a Liverpool-born shipping and timber merchant who became Member of Parliament for North Herefordshire and was created Baronet in 1898. Rankin died in 1915 and his monument is in the Church of St David.

The building is constructed of coursed squared sandstone with sandstone dressings, timber-frame elements, Welsh slate roof and brick stacks. It follows a roughly rectangular plan aligned west-south-west to east-north-east, with a former ballroom at the west end, a timber-framed extension and service wing at the east end of the main central block. It is built in High Victorian Gothic style and contains a cellar and three storeys.

The north elevation displays the main part with a window arrangement of 2:2:1:2:1:3, with two- and three-trefoil-headed lights under 2-centred heads with labels. One gable stands to the right of centre and another to the right-hand side. The ground floor features square-headed windows with continuous hoodmoulds and foliated capitals. A large three-bay port-cochere with 2-centred arches is decorated with columns bearing foliated capitals and a balustrade with trefoil-headed openings. The doorway within has a 2-centred head with black and white marble shafts featuring waist-bands and foliated capitals, and a two-leaved multi-panelled door. To the left is a service wing with four gables, trefoil-headed windows and dogtooth frieze. A late 19th-century timber-framed porch stands immediately to the left of the main part, with a gable displaying struts arranged herringbone fashion and glazed trefoil-headed panels on the returns. To the right is the single-storey former ballroom, which features a canted bay window with a central doorway flanked by shafts with foliated capitals. The bay window has a parapet decorated with trefoil motifs and is surmounted by a Lombard frieze decorated with trefoil-headed corbels. To the right of the ballroom is a large gabled chapel-like annex, now obscured by a late 20th-century flat-roofed building.

The south elevation contains a gable to the left with a blind wheel above two trefoil-headed lancets. To its right are nine blind arches with 2-centred heads forming the front of a former conservatory adjoining the ballroom. The main part has five gables, the centre one being taller and slightly advanced, containing three trefoil-headed first-floor windows above a small gabled and trefoil-headed canopy supported by two brown marble shafts with foliated capitals over the entrance door. The extreme right comprises a timber-framed and sandstone late 19th-century extension with remains of oriel windows and close-studding, which was ruinous at the time of re-survey in February 1986.

The interior features an extremely high four-flight imperial staircase with trefoiled balustrading and carved finials, lit from the north by an inward-facing first-floor oriel. Several late 19th-century fireplaces are present. Patterned oak floors to most of the ground floor feature squares with saltire crosses. Oak panelling lines the ground floor room and staircase dado. The ballroom has a deeply coved ceiling and a range of 2-centred archways with polychromatic decoration, with sliding doors that retract into jambs between the ballroom and conservatory. The service wing contains a four-flight newel staircase with octagonal balusters. The timber-framed extension, now ruinous, retains moulded ceiling beams.