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Dunns Mansion
Header: The Dunns, with Fern Cottages and the second Methodist Church, built in 1860. The ruins of Dunns Mansion, demolished in 1865 is in the centre and the residence, The Elms is on the right
More: The Dunns collection >
This is the story of Dunns Mansion, one of the bygone features of our locality, which live on only in the imagination and through stories passed down through the generations.
The Angells were once substantial property and landowners in the Mumbles Area, reputedly owning large stretches of land, some of which became submerged in the great storm of 1607 and which are now believed to lie under water off the Mumbles Head in the area, known as the Green Grounds.
One of their properties was Dunns Mansion (in earlier times spelled Dun's) a farmhouse and grounds situated approximately between where the White Rose Public House now stands and the sea. It was several hundreds of years old and is featured on Griffith Griffiths’s map of 1663, surrounded by several fields, owned at that time by Mr. Madocks.
Dunns Mansion ruins, pre 1855
By 1818, when the house was falling into decline, a plan was drawn up to illustrate a dispute between Sarah Angell, the owner and John Morris of the Railroad Company, which had constructed a railway line across her property without her permission, although she had not initially opposed it.
A plan of Dunns Mansion
She now claimed ownership of the land and had the plates taken up. The Company had them relaid and so she took the Company to Court in the name of her tenant, John Jenkins, a Solicitor, stating that her family had once owned large tracts of land including the Green Grounds, 'ere the sea had made its inroads on that flat which now forms the admired Swansea Bay'. She won her case, John Morris was fined £20 and the line was torn up.
After Dunns Mansion was Demolished
After Dunns Mansion was Demolished
The Dunns, with Fern Cottages and the second Methodist Church, built in 1860 and replaced by 1877 by the Third Methodist Church. The ruins of Dunns Mansion, demolished in 1855 is centre right and the, The Elms residence is further on the right
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The Dunns viewed from Mumbles Hill
, between 1877 and 1900.
At that time, the property comprised a Dwelling house, cow house, chandler’s shop, stables and stable yard, encompassing a garden plus fields. By the 1840s, the owner was Mary Maddox Angell, who lived at the neighbouring White Rose, then a private house. Her tenant was Matthew Davies, a mariner, who lived there with his wife, Mary née Button and two of their seven children, sons, Mathew and John. Mathew Junior worked on the boat Diligence, which was involved in the transportation of limestone to and fro in the Bristol Channel.
John Eley, The Dunns, 10 August 1909,
donated by Stuart Eley
John Eley, The Dunns, c.1910
Following its further decline, the buildings were demolished around 1855, to be superseded on the same site in the 1870s by the newly-built shop occupied by Eley the Butcher and later by Harry Libby’s Travel Agent, at the side of the narrow road which was to become known as The Dunns. This and the other shops, built later in the row, were demolished in 1970, becoming yet more vanished Mumbles landmarks.
Libby's Travel Agency, The Dunns, before 1965
The Dunns, Demolition in progress, 1970,
donated by L. MacariMore: The Dunns collection >
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