incorporating a Doric portico and wings, and commissioning the long stone wall which runs along the western edge of the estate. Wood was also the owner of Llanthony Priory. In 1798, the Chepstow Volunteer Cavalry was raised as part of the war effort against Napoleon, and received their standard at Piercefield from Mrs Wood. In 1802, Wood in turn sold the house and estate to the planter and slave owner Nathaniel Wells. Wells was born in St Kitts, the son of William Wells, a sugar merchant and planter originally from Cardiff, and Juggy, one of his house slaves. With his inherited fortune, Wells continued to add to the Piercefield estate until it reached almost 3,000 acres (12 km2). In 1818 he became Britain's only known black sheriff when he was appointed Sheriff of Monmouthshire. Wells put the estate up for sale in 1825 after discovering dry rot, but it failed to sell. The number of tourists in the area increased considerably after the opening of the new Wye valley turnpike road in the mid-1820s, and thereafter Wells only lived at Piercefield intermittently, at times letting it out to tenants. It is rumoured that Admiral Nelson spent a night at Piercefield House on one of his visits to Monmouthshire. Nelson was closely connected to the town of Monmouth through his mistress Lady Hamilton. It is possible that he stayed in the summer of 1802 with her and her elderly husband Sir William Hamilton, on a journey to a friend's Pembrokeshire estate via Monmouth and Kymin Hill. Wells left the area in the 1840s and his tenants closed the walks to the public. In the late 1840s the estate was leased to John Russell (1788–1873) the coal and ironmaster (appointed High Sheriff of Monmouthshire in 1855), who owned the neighbouring estate of Wyelands. In 1856, following Nathaniel Wells’ death in 1852, Russell purchased the estate. The walks were occasionally reopened to the public, but for a charge. Around this time suggestions were made in the national press that the estate would be a suitable residence for the Prince of Wales. However, following the explosion at his Risca Blackvein Colliery, Russell sold the estate in 1861 to Henry Clay, a banker and brewer from Burton-on-Trent. In 1863, Piercefield was the site of a parade and mock battle between volunteers from Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire recruited in the patriotic fervour after the Crimean War; the