97 Kilvrough Manor

97 Kilvrough Manor

Kilvrough Manor stands behind a high curving stone wall on the south side of the A4118 from Fairwood Common to Parkmill, though before the First World War the estate included substantial land on both sides of the road. 

The original mansion was built in 1585 for Rowland Dawkin, whose grandson was one of Oliver Cromwell’s deputy Major-Generals who ruled the country after the Civil War.  After the monarchy was restored in 1660 and Puritan minister John Myles ejected from Ilston church, Dawkin permitted members of Wales’s first Baptist Church to meet on land at Trinity Well in the Ilston Valley, until increasingly repressive legislation caused some of them to emigrate to the New World, founding the settlement of Swanzey, Massachusetts.
The name of a later Rowland Dawkin, who became Sheriff of Glamorgan, is inscribed on a 1737 bell in St Mary’s Church, Pennard.
In the late eighteenth century Kilvrough was remodelled to a design of William Jernegan, before being purchased in 1820 by Major Thomas Penrice of Great Yarmouth, who later served as High Sheriff of Glamorgan. The grounds contain a folly in the form of a medieval-type tower, possibly inspired by the Gnoll’s Ivy Tower folly in Neath.
In June 1831 at the time of the Merthyr Rising, the Marquess of Bute, who was Lord Lieutenant of Glamorgan, sent Major Penrice there to tackle civil unrest.  To his great embarrassment, Penrice and his Yeomanry troops were disarmed near Merthyr by a large mob of rioters and, following an official inquiry, the local Yeomanry unit was reorganised by the Government.  Major Penrice built the Gower Inn in Parkmill, and had embarked on restoring Pennard Church at the time of his death in 1846. 
As he had never married, the estate passed to his 26-year-old nephew, also named Thomas Penrice – later a striking figure with a long white beard.  He married in 1852, and acquired more land in Gower, making Kilvrough second in size in the peninsula to the Talbots’ estate, with 5,411 acres in 1883.  He built the steepled Parkmill School (now West Glamorgan Guides Centre), and introduced new farming methods which put Kilvrough among the most productive estates in South Wales.  In 1893 he gave evidence to the Royal Commission on Land in Wales when his decision not to let Gower folk singer Phil Tanner take on the tenancy of land near Llangennith was unsuccessfully challenged.  Three years later Thomas Penrice leased out land at Pennard Burrows for twenty people to play golf, which was the start of Pennard Golf Club.
After his death in 1896, Kilvrough was left to his elder daughter Louisa, who had married Admiral Algernon Lyons, becoming Lady Lyons when her husband was knighted.  Thomas Penrice’s second daughter, Jane, had married William Benson of Fairy Hill, although she died aged 33, predeceasing her father.  But heavy death duties were incurred after the death in 1908 of Admiral Lyons, and when their eldest son died of pneumonia in 1918 - two months after Lady Lyons had handed the estate over to him.  This, coupled with the loss of their considerable German investments through the First World War, led to the dispersal of the estate, with Kilvrough itself sold two years later.  Pennard Golf Club purchased the burrows (with Pennard Castle), while Home Farm was bought in 1920 by the estate’s agent T.E. “Tom” Jenkins, grandfather of the late poet Nigel Jenkins: on their land stands the lime kiln with a small blue plaque.
After staying briefly at Vennaway, Lady Lyons moved to Eastbourne, though on her death aged 88 in 1935, she was buried in St Mary’s churchyard, Pennard, like others of the Penrice and Lyons families.  In the 1930s Kilvrough was purchased by a Swansea businessman, and then became a youth hostel from 1949 to 1970, before becoming one of Oxfordshire County Council’s three rural studies field centres, as it is today.