PERISCOPES TO THE PAST
Historical art trail
We are very pleased to announce that Grangetown Art Trail received a 15-minute heritage grant from the Heritage Lottery for Periscopes to the Past.
We built five periscopes that contain scenes from Grangetown's history. We invited residents to suggest periods/events from Grangetown's past to be represented from which we made a selection. We will also be hosting free writing workshops as part of the project by Sophie Buchaillard
GRANGETOWN HISTORY
PERISCOPES PROJECT
EARLY ORIGINS OF GRANGETOWN – GRANGE FARM
Grange Farm, often known as Moor Grange, was established in the early thirteenth century as a monastic grange. It was owned by the Cistercian monks of Margam Abbey who farmed the land. Throughout the medieval period there are references to the ‘the grange on the moor near Kardif.’
The grange continued to be owned and leased out by the monks until the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century. The land passed to the Lewis family in 1537 and was described in 1595 as ‘messuage (house and outbuildings), one barn, one parcel of land, meadow and pasture called the Graing de Moore’, arguably the area had declined somewhat since the monks’ ownership.
Grange Farm House, which still stands today on the corner of Clive Street and Stockland Street, is the oldest building in Grangetown. Now surrounded by terraced housing, it was built in the late medieval period and was once the only house within miles of marshland. It was considered to be the only house between Cardiff and Penarth up until the mid-nineteenth century.
By 1638, ‘the manor land they called the Grange Marshes,’ was 300 acres, each with a yearly value of 4d. It was ‘bounded by the higher lands of Penarth in the west, the Severne shore on the south, and the River Tave on the east, and the common lands of Leckwith in the north’.
In 1881, the farm, leased to the Morgan family by the Earl of Plymouth, was being run as a 120-acre dairy farm which supplied milk to the local area. The dairy continued to operate throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.
For more information visit Grangetown History Society: http://www.grangetownhistory.co.uk/grangefarm.htm
