FROM the earliest days, Tredegar House and Park was first and foremost an agricultural estate.

When you visit the House today, the start of Autumn is a scene of calm after the busy Summer. The leaves are starting to turn, the view grows misty and the days draw in. After a walk through the Park, or a stroll around the lake, the café seems ever more inviting.

However, while the Morgan family lived here, this time of year was one of the busiest of the calendar. It was time to bring in the harvest.

The agricultural land at Cleppa Park, known as the Hundred Acres, was recorded in 1731 as having 40 acres of barley, 34 acres of wheat, 10 acres of turnips and swedes, and nine acres of pease.

Farm workers, together with itinerant seasonal labourers, were called in from the Estate’s tenant farms, and it took a large work force working long days, dawn to dusk, to get the harvest in. In 1802 it took 63 men, women, girls and boys to complete the process. By 1862 it took 94 labourers to bring in the wheat harvest.

Men were the reapers, while the women and girls worked as the binding teams, tying the wheat into sheaths and making them into stooks. The stooks were then loaded onto wagons to be transported to The Mill at the Home Farm (which still exists today). The Mill would be busy for the next two months, flaying and thrashing, and filling sacks with the ground oats for the family’s and the animals’ consumption.

Many crops were grown throughout the year in addition to wheat, including barley, oats, hops and mangelwurzels. As well as hay, grass seeds and clover were also sown during the War years.

During the First World War German POWs were drafted in to get the hay harvested, together with volunteers from the Bromyard Officer Training Corps. Large quantities of the hay made on the estate went to the industrial valleys and the South Wales collieries. In the 1930s the haymaking started at The Garth (now the Friendly Fox) and at the forty acres at Lower Machen. Next the 50-acre Stud Farm would be mown, before moving on to the 140 acres of hay in the Home farm.

In 1939 the estate had 10 Shire horses used for ploughing the winter wheat, followed by the barley. Throughout the Second World War the Hundred Acres was devoted to growing clover and grass seed, then root crops later in the war. Land girls, POWs and volunteers were called in to perform the hundreds of tasks to bring home the vital wartime harvest.

Today, Tredegar House makes a more leisurely progress into winter, but the hard work of maintaining the vast parkland and formal gardens goes on, so that visitors will be able to enjoy them for decades to come.

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