14/06/2022
Twr y Deri - Derry Ormond Tower
In the 18th Century, a country estate, near Lampeter, known as Derry Ormond was in financial difficulty. The owner David Jones, Sheriff of Cardiganshire, had died in 1775, owing a considerable amount of money. To clear his debts, Derry Ormond was put up for sale but there was little interest and it was not until 1783, eight years later that a buyer was found. A London based surgeon-apothecary named John Jones, no relation of the sheriff, acquired the estate for paltry £1575. He then expanded it, buying more land and building a new house for himself.
The new residents of Derry Ormond prospered and John Jones’ son, Thomas John Jones, formed a partnership to create the Banc y Llong, or ‘Ship Bank’ so called because of the ships featured on its bank notes. The official name of the business was the Aberystwyth and Cardiganshire Bank. The bank opened a branch office in London offering a service to Welsh Drovers who, having driven large herds of livestock to England and sold the animals, needed to return the money they made to Wales. A £1 note from the Banc y Llong is kept in the National Museum of Wales at St. Fagans. When Thomas died in 1817 his son, another John, inherited the estate together with a respectable fortune.
While the Jones family had been making their fortune, Europe had been engaged in a long and bloody series of military campaigns known as the Napoleonic Wars. The wars ended in 1815 and the people across Europe looked forward to a period of peace and prosperity. Men put down their weapons. Swords were beaten into ploughshares and men across the continent returned to farming the land. Agricultural production leapt causing a surplus of food. The price of corn and other staple foods collapsed and the world, including places as far from the conflict as America, went into recession.
As elsewhere, the farmers of Wales were faced with ruin. To survive, they cut their labourer’s wages and then, as prices fell further, sacked the men. Families were evicted from tied cottages and people starved. In an effort to stop prices falling further, ‘Corn Laws’ were passed to ban the importation of foreign grown cereals. Fearing political unrest, the authorities introduced measures to suppress ‘seditious meetings’. Habeus corpus, the law which protect individuals from unlawful arrest, was suspended and the military were drafted in to keep order. Once armed soldiers were involved, it was only a matter of time before there would be a tragedy and, in 1818, soldiers killed several rioters in Manchester in an event known as the ‘Peterloo Massacre’.
Realising the difficulties facing his tenant farmers at Derry Ormond, John Jones decided to help, not by giving them charity but by finding them paid work to do. Jones decided to employ the men of the parish of Bettws Bledrws to build a tower and contacted Charles Robert Cockerell, a young architect, to ask his advice. Cockerell would eventually become one of the most prominent architects of his generation responsible for designing many grand buildings across the land. Cockerell made some suggestions and passed the commission to Charles James of Llanddewi Brefi to design the tower John Jones wanted to build.
A local builder, David Morgan, whose gravestone in Bettws Bledrws churchyard states that he is “the contractor and builder of the Derry Ormond Tower,” employed local men to build the 127 ft (38.7m) tall tower. The site chosen for the tower was a hill on common land near Derry Ormond House and, when completed, the tower could be seen from miles away. Building the tower provided temporary relief but once it was finished there was no other employment for the men. Jones’ solution was a radical one; he again asked his friend, the architect Cockerell for help. Cockerell designed a magnificent new country house for Jones who then used a significant part of his fortune to build it. Once the new house was built, Jones had the country house that had been built by his grandfather a mere forty years before demolished. Having built what has been described as “an elegant modern mansion in the neo classical style,” Jones continued spending his fortune. His next project was to landscape parkland around the mansion. Cockerell was given the task of designing the park and his scheme was ambitious; including, as it did, altering the course of the river below the house to create three lakes. When, in 1867, the Manchester and Milford Railway Company built a branch line between Carmarthen and Aberystwyth they added a small station at Derry Ormond Halt, illustrating the importance of the estate at that time. The passenger train service finished in 1964 and the line closed in 1970.
In the years following John Jones’ major improvements to Derry Ormond and the building of his tower, the family fortune went into decline. In 1949, the owner, Wilmot Inglis-Jones - the family had changed its name - died and in 1950 the mansion was sold for £3000. It was demolished in 1953.
In the 1970s the tower was considered unsafe and it was suggested that it should be demolished. One plan was for the army to blow it up. Fortunately, that act of vandalism was avoided and instead the army helped to reinforce the increasingly unstable structure with several tons of concrete.
By giving the men of Bettws Bledrws work, John Jones may have alleviated their suffering but seems, by doing so, to have squandered his family fortune, leaving the Derry Ormond Estate unable to support itself. No one knows for sure but his folly has left one legacy; a tower that is now a listed building and serves no practical purpose except to intrigue those who see it.
Twr y Deri - Derry Ormond Tower is an extract from 'The Welsh Folly Book' containing the stories of sixty Welsh Follies. http://ow.ly/KcWVE
