A country house near Wrexham as interested in the people who scrubbed its floors as the family who owned it
Open to visitorsa National Trust place — check opening times and admission before you go
Most big houses tell you about the family upstairs and leave the staff as a footnote. Erddig does the opposite, or near enough gives them equal billing. The Yorkes, who held the place for around two and a half centuries, had a habit of commissioning portraits and cheerful doggerel verses about their servants — the gamekeeper, the carpenter, the housemaids — and hanging them up where visitors would see them. The result is one of the fullest records anywhere of what domestic service actually looked like, which is why people call it the Welsh Downton Abbey, for better or worse.
The other draw is the garden: an eighteenth-century walled formal garden, restored, with fruit trained on the walls, avenues of pleached limes and a national collection of ivies. It survived largely because nobody could afford to modernise it, the family money having drained away. By the time Philip Yorke III handed the house to the National Trust in 1973 it was in a sorry state, undermined by coal-mining subsidence, and the rescue was a serious piece of work.
It’s a ticketed visit with set opening hours. Give yourself time for both the house and the outbuildings; the stables, sawmill and smithy are half the point here. When you’re done, the Clwydian Range and Dee Valley rises to the west for a proper walk, and St Giles’ Church in Wrexham, a couple of miles north, has a tower long counted among the wonders of Wales.
