Grade II* listed buildings in Monmouthshire

Monmouthshire is a county of Wales. It borders Torfaen and Newport to the west; Herefordshire and Gloucestershire to the east; and Powys to the north. The largest town is Abergavenny, with the other major towns being Chepstow, Monmouth, and Usk.^[1] The county is 850 km² (330 sq mi) in extent,^[2] with a population of 95,200 as of 2020^[update].^[3] The present county was formed under the Local Government (Wales) Act 1994, which came into effect in 1996, and comprises some sixty percent of the historic county.^[4][5] Between 1974 and 1996, the county was known by the ancient title of Gwent,^[6] recalling the medieval Welsh kingdom.^[7] In his essay on local government in the fifth and final volume of the Gwent County History, Robert McCloy suggests that the governance of "no county in the United Kingdom in the twentieth century was so transformed as that of Monmouthshire".^[8]

In the United Kingdom the term "listed building" refers to a building or structure officially designated as of special architectural, historical or cultural significance. Listing was begun by a provision in the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. Once a building is listed, strict limitations are imposed on allowable modifications to its structure or fittings. In Wales,^[9] the authority for listing under the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 rests with Cadw.^[10] Listed buildings are categorised into three grades:

• Grade I – buildings of exceptional interest, only 2.5% of listed buildings in England and Wales are Grade I;
• Grade II* – buildings of particular importance with more than special interest, 5.8% of listed buildings in England and Wales are Grade II*;
• Grade II – buildings of special interest; 91.7% of all listed buildings in England and Wales are in this class.^[11]

There are 244 Grade II* listed buildings in Monmouthshire.^{[12][note 1]} They include seventy-two houses, forty-two churches, thirty-five farmhouses, twenty-one commercial premises, eight bridges, seven barns, six garden structures, four sets of walls, railings or gates, three gatehouses, two chapels, two community centres, two dovecotes, an almshouse, an aqueduct, a castle, a courthouse, a cross, a dairy, a folly, a masonic lodge, a mill, a prison, a former slaughterhouse, a statue and a theatre.^{[note 2]}

The architecture of the county was first systematically covered by William Coxe in his two-volume journal, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, published in 1801.^{[note 3]} A detailed county history was undertaken by Sir Joseph Bradney, in his A History of Monmouthshire from the Coming of the Normans into Wales down to the Present Time, published in the early 20th century.^[20] More recent studies include those of the architectural historian John Newman, in his Gwent/Monmouthshire volume of the Pevsner Buildings of Wales series published in 2000; the coverage of Monmouthshire houses in Peter Smith's Houses of the Welsh Countryside, published in 1975 and, most exhaustively, by Sir Cyril Fox and Lord Raglan, in their three-volume study, Monmouthshire Houses, published between 1951 and 1954.^[21] The last was described by Smith as "one of the most remarkable studies of vernacular architecture yet made in the British Isles"^[22] and "a landmark, in its own field, as significant as Darwin's Origin of Species".^[23]

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