National Botanic Garden of Wales
He used his great wealth to employ some of the finest creative minds of his day, including the eminent architect Samuel Pepys Cockerell, whom he commissioned to design and build a new Middleton Hall, turning the original one into a farm.
A beautiful tower erected to the memory of the noble hero the late Lord Nelson, forming a grand and prominent feature in the Property and a Land Mark in the County, opposite to which are the Ruins of Dryslwyn Castle, and the Grongar Hills, with the Towey winding to a great extent, presenting a scenery that may vie with any County.
As to local amenities, the Roads are excellent, a good Neighborhood, and Country abounding with highly Picturesque SceneryMiddleton Hall estate was sold to Jamaican-born West India merchant, Edward Hamlin Adams, for £54,700.
Adams, neither a gardener nor a lover of water features, added buildings that aided his love of country sports, but let the bath houses fall into disrepair.
In 1842 the estate passed into the hands of his eccentric son Edward, who immediately changed his name from Adams into the Welsh form Abadam.
As his son predeceased him, on his death in 1875 the estate passed to his eldest daughter, Lucy, then next sister Adah who had married into the local Hughes family.
[6] Edward Abadam's youngest daughter, Alice, was a leading suffragist, and a blue plaque to her was unveiled in 2018, the centenary of women's suffrage, in the gardens of what had been Middleton Hall, her childhood home, by her great-niece Margaret Vaughan.
[7] In 1931, the mansion was completely gutted by fire, leaving only the walls standing, themselves covered in globules of molten lead from the melted roof.
Many experts have commented that this view gives visitors an ability to see and hence understand something of what the great landscape architects of the end of the eighteenth century understood by the word "picturesque".
[13] Constructed virtually on the same site as Paxton's new but now demolished Middleton Hall, the Great Glasshouse, designed by Foster and Partners, is the largest structure of its kind in the world.
The Waun Las national nature reserve is accessed from the garden and comprises some 150 hectares (370 acres) of wildflower meadows and pastures.
